During the course of the past decade, we have witnessed a significant number of asset owners and managers increasing their exposure to private market asset classes including private equity, private debt, real estate and infrastructure, to enhance risk-adjusted returns for their clients and achieve greater diversification.
While this strategy appears to be delivering the targeted benefits, it is not without its costs, notably increasing the complexity of existing operating models and placing new demands on operations to develop supporting functional capabilities.
One such capability is the delivery of multi-asset investment data and reports. It requires managers to provide a holistic view of the portfolio’s exposures and performance and therefore, needing the capability to aggregate positions data, which is often located across multiple position-keeping systems.
Managers need to collect, validate, enrich, normalise and aggregate this data to produce investment reports. The process is highly manual and prone to errors leading to frequent re-working and restating. It carries a high degree of reputational and regulatory risk for managers and is a challenge that is not easy to solve.
So, what is the solution?
As always, there is no ‘one size fits all’ answer. It will depend on several factors, for example your budget, time horizon and the maturity and sophistication of your existing operating model and reporting capabilities. Examples may include:
- Running a split position-keeping model, with separate best-in-class private and public markets platforms; consolidating positions through a data aggregation and reporting solution; Snowflake being a key example.
- Proxying positions between systems to consolidate positions data into one place.
- Selection of a system that covers the full suite of assets under management.
- Hybrid approaches based on combinations of these.
We can advise on the approach that best suits your requirements. To find out more, contact us.
