You Can’t Vibe Code Cross-Fund Performance Analytics

Private markets growth should be a positive thing instead of an operational anchor that drags down the back-office fund performance reporting efforts. This year, Nuveen bought Schroders Capital's private markets business to birth a giant with $414 billion in combined private markets assetsⁱ; Mercer agreed to acquire AltamarCAM, which manages about $22 billion in private market AUMⁱⁱ; and in 2025 BlackRock acquired HPS Investment Partners to deploy $220 billion in private credit.

While the front office uncorks their champagne, the operations teams are adding lines to interminable spreadsheets and diving into a perplexing cross-fund performance analytics morass. Fund accounting and performance measurement teams know what they want: cross-fund performance intelligence, the ability to extract insights and track performance across any and all asset classes or structures in a firm’s portfolio. Once they conclude it is onerous to do it the old-fashioned way, they may summon IT to do one-off engineering projects or do some vibe coding.

This level of analytical sophistication for illiquid and structured products requires institutional infrastructure, not ad hoc tooling that crumples under the weight of scale. This is why you cannot vibe code standardized, auditable cross-fund intelligence.

Structural complexity is the quiet cost of growth by acquisition

For a firm trying to compete on the strength of its brand equity, this is the quiet cost of growth by acquisition: more funds, multiple methodologies, more manual work, and performance numbers that are never quite as fresh or trustworthy as they need to be. Unified private markets data becomes a distant dream.

Real-world scenario: fund manager acquires three subsidiaries

Suppose a $30 billion fund manager acquired three established private credit subsidiaries that, combined, will give it $25 billion additional AUM to manage. Suddenly, the manager’s single operating model is asked to integrate 30 or 40 active funds of multiple vintages and fund administrators. The confetti falls to celebrate the newfound scale, almost doubling the size of the firm. However, the deal has created a data management problem that poses serious challenges to the firm's ability to tell its own performance story.

Three managers with three methods of tracking and measurement

Each acquired subsidiary comes to the party with its own operational processes, people, and models. All three routinely track fund performance using spreadsheets, but these three sheets are not all the same. There are no standardized formulas or performance calculation methodologies.

Three answers to one important performance question

Each acquired firm had meticulously designed their spreadsheets over the years, in accordance with their own IRR methodologies, with their own assumptions, cash flow conventions, and formulas embedded in cell logic – key-person logic that is not easily understood by colleagues. Any fat-finger mistake could distort an IRR figure, and nothing in the process would necessarily catch the discrepancy. Instead of a single clean answer, three fund managers give three different answers to a question. And all three could be wrong.

An investment performance reporting bottleneck

In the newly scaled $55 billion firm, fund administrators have to value each portfolio and calculate net asset value (NAV) before any total performance figure can be computed. Unfortunately, instead of a daily or weekly cadence, net assets are calculated quarterly, fund by fund. Therefore, the performance calculation becomes beholden to the quarterly valuation cycle. That will not suffice in the competition for investors.

Prospective investors receive stale data

Meanwhile, the business development team manually pulls performance figures out of each fund's spreadsheet and transcribes them into marketing materials. Precise results typically are not released until a manual, fund-by-fund extraction exercise was completed, as late as the second month of the following quarter. By the time performance information reaches prospective investors, it is weeks old. The quiet cost of the acquisitions becomes loud and obvious to all. The result: a rickety performance reporting workflow, strained at every stage, and late to the party.