Event
We’re sponsoring the Markets Group Private Equity New York Forum.
Patrick Krajci, Head of Private Equity North America will speak on the keynote panel, “Strategic Shifts – How to Navigate U.S. Investment Amid Economic Uncertainty”. He’ll be sharing insights on how investors are adapting to today’s evolving market dynamics.
Also attending from our team are Devin Vasquez, Emily Inman, Tom Cavagnaro – feel free to connect with them on the networking platform and during the event.
#MarketsGroupPE
No related content found.
Analysis
As governance demands intensify, endowments, foundations, pensions, and asset owner groups are rethinking their operating models to ensure that oversight is informed, timely, and actionable.
Michael Loughton
Managing Director, Alter Domus
In Part 1, we explored how governance expectations have evolved as portfolios have grown more complex. Investment committees and boards are placing greater scrutiny on the quality of information, liquidity assumptions, and the operational frameworks that support decision-making.
The implication is clear: governance is no longer defined solely by structure or mandate. Its effectiveness is determined by how consistently it can be translated into execution.
This is where the operating model becomes critical.
Oversight does not happen in isolation. It is enabled or constrained by the systems, data flows, and processes that sit beneath it. Where those foundations are fragmented or manual, governance becomes reactive. Where they are integrated and controlled, governance becomes proactive and confident.
Across many asset owners, the challenge is not a lack of governance frameworks. It is the friction within the operating model that undermines them.
Three failure points are consistently observed:
1. Fragmented data environments
Portfolio data is dispersed across administrators, managers, custodians, brokers, and internal systems. Reconciling these sources of data is time-consuming and often incomplete, limiting the ability to form a single, trusted view of exposures.
2. Delayed and inconsistent reporting
Decision-making is frequently based on backward-looking information. By the time data reaches investment committees, it may already be outdated or inconsistent across sources.
3. Limited forward visibility
Liquidity, commitments, and portfolio-level risk are not always visible in a forward-looking, aggregated format. This constrains the ability to anticipate and respond to changing conditions.
These are not technical issues in isolation. They directly affect governance outcomes — slowing decision-making, reducing confidence, and increasing reliance on judgment where data should lead.
Leading asset owners are responding by repositioning operations as core governance infrastructure.
This shift is not about incremental efficiency. It is about enabling three capabilities that underpin effective oversight:
1. A single, reconciled source of truth
Data must be aggregated, validated, and standardized across managers and asset classes — but more importantly, it must be controlled and traceable.
The objective is not simply visibility, but trust: the ability for boards, auditors, investment, and operations teams to rely on a consistent version of portfolio data.
2. Timely, decision-ready information
Operating models must deliver information at the cadence required for decision-making — not at the pace dictated by underlying processes.
This includes:
3. Forward-looking portfolio intelligence
Oversight increasingly depends on anticipating, not reacting.
This requires:
Together, these capabilities move governance from periodic review to continuous oversight.
As these requirements intensify, many institutions are reassessing how their operating models are delivered.
Traditional models — built on internal teams supplemented by multiple service providers — often struggle to scale with portfolio complexity. The result is duplication, manual reconciliation, and inconsistent outputs.
In contrast, integrated operating models — delivered in partnership with specialist providers are designed to:
This is not a shift away from control. It is a shift towards structured, independent oversight, supported by institutional-grade infrastructure.
Ultimately, the effectiveness of an operating model is measured by its impact on decision-making.
Where operating foundations are strong:
Where they are weak:
The difference is not marginal. It is structural.
For asset owners, the objective has not changed: to deliver long-term performance while preserving mission.
What has changed is the operating discipline required to support that objective at scale.
Effective oversight is no longer defined by governance frameworks alone. It is defined by the operating model that enables them — shaping how information flows, how decisions are made, and how confidently institutions can act across market cycles.
This is driving a shift towards more integrated operating models, where data aggregation, validation, and reporting are delivered through a single, controlled infrastructure rather than across fragmented providers and internal processes.
At Alter Domus, this is reflected in operating models that bring together accounting, administration, and reporting within a single, controlled framework – enabling institutions to move from fragmented oversight to consistent, decision-ready insight.
As portfolios continue to grow in complexity, those that invest in operating infrastructure will not only strengthen governance. They will gain a more fundamental advantage: the ability to translate insight into action, consistently and at scale.
North America
Managing Director, North America
Get in touch to learn more about our range of services.
Please complete the form and a member of our team will be in touch with you shortly.
"*" indicates required fields
Analysis
As Fund of Funds strategies evolve, so do operating models. Discover how Fund of Funds managers are modernizing operations to improve efficiency, transparency, and scalability.
Fund of Funds operating models are evolving because traditional reporting structures and manual workflows are increasingly struggling to support the scale, transparency, and visibility requirements of modern alternatives investing.
For years, many FoF operating models evolved incrementally rather than strategically.
New manager relationships were added over time. Additional LP reporting requests were layered into existing workflows. Operational processes expanded organically as portfolios grew.
The result was often a fragmented operating structure built around:
At smaller scale, these models could function effectively.
As portfolios expanded, however, operational complexity frequently increased faster than infrastructure itself.
Institutional investors increasingly expect:
At the same time, alternatives portfolios themselves have become significantly more complex.
Preqin forecasts alternatives assets under management will continue expanding rapidly over the coming decade, creating additional operational pressure across private markets infrastructure.
Many FoF managers now oversee exposure across:
This creates operational pressure across:
The challenge is no longer simply administration. It is coordination across fragmented operational ecosystems.
Centralized Operational Oversight: Many firms are moving toward more centralized operating frameworks designed to improve consistency across reporting, governance, and portfolio visibility.
Stronger Data Governance: Data quality and normalization are increasingly becoming strategic priorities rather than purely administrative concerns.
Integrated Operational Intelligence: Many firms are moving beyond static reporting structures toward infrastructure designed to support continuous visibility and faster portfolio insight generation.
Operational capability increasingly influences:
Bain has noted that private markets are increasingly shifting toward execution-driven outcomes, with operational capability and specialization becoming more important differentiators across the industry.
This is particularly relevant across:
As LP expectations continue rising, operational maturity is becoming more closely linked to competitive differentiation.
The firms likely to differentiate most effectively may not simply be those with strong investment performance. Increasingly, they may also be the firms capable of building scalable operational infrastructure around increasingly complex portfolios.
Standardized Workflows: Reducing Fragmentation across reporting and oversight processes
Integrated reporting frameworks: Creating greater consistency across managers and structures
Enhanced Transparency: Improving portfolio visibility for institutional investors
Scalable Operational Oversight: Supporting portfolio growth without proportionally increasing the operational burden
Stronger Governance Frameworks: Improving confidence around reporting quality and operational resilience.
FoF operating models are evolving because growing portfolio complexity and rising investor transparency expectations are placing increasing pressure on manual workflows and fragmented reporting structures.
Key operational challenges include:
Limited portfolio visibility.
Fragmented manager reporting
Reconciliation complexity
Data normalization
Investor reporting customization
Operational intelligence refers to the ability to create integrated portfolio visibility and actionable insight across fragmented reporting and operational ecosystems.
As fund of funds managers scale, success increasingly depends on modern operating models, greater transparency, and the ability to manage growing complexity with confidence.
Growing portfolios bring greater operational complexity. Explore the key pressures fund of fund managers face and how scalable operating models help maintain control.
LPs increasingly expect deeper portfolio transparency. We explore why look-through reporting is becoming a strategic differentiator for fund of fund managers.
Get in touch to learn more about our range of services.
Please complete the form and a member of our team will be in touch with you shortly.
"*" indicates required fields
Analysis
Private markets managers are investing more capital and managing more fund structures than ever before. As platforms scale, maintaining consistent reporting across increasingly complex portfolios is becoming harder. This article explores why small data inconsistencies compound at scale, how repeatability underpins reporting reliability, and why a unified data perspective is emerging as the foundation for operational intelligence and institutional confidence.
Elliott Brown
Global Head of Private Equity
Private markets have entered a new phase of scale. Since 2008, global private markets AUM has grown from roughly $4 trillion to $16 trillion. As platforms expand across strategies, jurisdictions, and vehicles, operational models originally designed for smaller portfolios are now under significant strain.
This growth has not only increased asset complexity, but also reporting expectations. Institutional investors now view private markets as a core portfolio allocation and expect transparency, consistency, and timeliness that match that importance.
At the same time, operational teams remain heavily reliant on manual monitoring processes, while large volumes of data remain unstructured. This limits the ability of managers to respond to LP demands and maintain consistent reporting across portfolios as they scale.
Consistency, rather than accuracy alone, is becoming the defining operational challenge.
Maintaining accuracy has always mattered. Maintaining consistency is now the bigger issue.
As private markets platforms expand geographically and across strategies, data flows through multiple administrators, AIFMs, and internal systems. Managers often reconcile figures from disconnected sources, each with different structures, formats, and reporting timelines.
These reconciliations frequently rely on manual interpretation. Data arrives at different times, in different formats, and under different capture protocols. The result is not necessarily incorrect reporting, but inconsistent reporting.
This distinction matters.
A cluster of small inconsistencies at the asset level can quickly compound into material differences at the fund level. Over time, this erodes confidence, slows decision-making, and creates friction in fundraising and governance.
Consistency, not just accuracy, becomes the defining requirement.
Historically, firms addressed reporting complexity by expanding operational teams. But private markets platforms have now crossed a threshold where scaling through hiring alone is no longer sustainable.
The size and complexity of modern platforms require a different approach. Managers are shifting toward operational models built around structured data, repeatable processes, and automation.
Operational intelligence is becoming as important as investment strategy. Reporting is no longer a back-office output. It is now central to fundraising, portfolio management, and investment decision-making.
The ability to collect, process, and model data consistently is increasingly shaping how managers compete.
Repeatability is emerging as the foundation of consistent reporting.
Data repeatability means applying the same collection, formatting, and processing methods across investments, funds, and jurisdictions. When data is repeatable, reporting becomes predictable. When reporting is predictable, it becomes scalable.
Repeatability enables automation. Clean, structured data allows firms to replace manual reconciliations with standardized workflows. This improves speed, reduces risk, and strengthens reporting reliability.
It also builds institutional confidence. Investment committees and LPs gain visibility into performance, supported by data that is predictable and trusted.
Without repeatability, complexity compounds. Processes vary across jurisdictions. Data fragments. Manual interpretation increases. Inconsistency grows.
Embedding repeatability requires a shift in how firms view data. Data must move from an operational concern to a strategic priority.
Leadership alignment is the starting point. Consistency must be treated as a firm-wide objective, not just a finance or operations initiative.
The next step is structuring and standardizing data. When data remains unstructured, manual processes dominate. When data is structured and standardized, automation and AI can be deployed to replace manual intervention.
This transforms data management from interpretation to orchestration. Reporting becomes consistent. Processes become scalable. Visibility improves.
Firms that institutionalize repeatability operate with greater stability, even as complexity increases.
When repeatability is embedded, data management evolves. It moves beyond assembling reports toward enabling insight:
Consistency becomes more than an operational outcome. It becomes a competitive advantage.
As private markets platforms continue to scale, consistency is becoming a defining capability. Small inconsistencies no longer remain isolated. They compound across funds, jurisdictions, and reporting cycles.
Managers that prioritize repeatability, structured data, and consistent operating models will be better positioned to scale with confidence and meet rising investor expectations.
This is where a unified data perspective becomes critical. We are developing Alter Domus Intelligence, a digital operating environment that connects client-facing services, data, and workflows, enhanced with AI-driven insight and automation. This capability will bring together information from across fund administrators, AIFMs, entities, and internal systems into a single, consistent view. By standardizing data structures and enabling repeatable reporting frameworks, managers gain coherence across platforms rather than reconciling fragmented outputs.
This foundation supports consistent reporting, clearer portfolio visibility, and operational models designed to scale. It also enables automation and AI-driven workflows to sit on top of standardized data, improving reliability while reducing manual intervention.
The firms that address consistency early will not only improve reporting reliability. They will build the data foundation required to scale with control, strengthen investor confidence, and operate with clarity under pressure.
United States
Global Head, Private Equity
Get in touch to learn more about our range of services.
Please complete the form and a member of our team will be in touch with you shortly.
"*" indicates required fields
Analysis
Manual, spreadsheet-driven processes can expose fund of funds managers to unnecessary operational risk. Explore why technology is becoming essential for scalable operations.
Spreadsheet-driven fund of funds operations can create operational risk because manual workflows often struggle to support the scale, transparency, governance, and reporting consistency requirements of modern alternatives investing.
Spreadsheets remain deeply embedded across alternatives operations.
They are flexible, familiar, and relatively easy to adapt quickly.
For many firms, spreadsheets initially supported portfolio oversight effectively during earlier growth stages.
As portfolios scale, however, spreadsheet-driven workflows can become increasingly difficult to manage consistently.
Many FoF managers now oversee:
This level of operational complexity can place significant strain on manual processes.
Spreadsheet-driven oversight often depends heavily on:
As operational complexity increases, these processes can create:
The challenge is not that spreadsheets are inherently ineffective.
The challenge is that fragmented manual workflows often become difficult to scale efficiently across increasingly complex portfolios.
Preqin forecasts the alternatives industry will exceed $30 trillion in assets under management by 2030, increasing operational pressure across reporting and oversight functions.
At the same time, institutional investors increasingly expect:
This combination is reshaping operational expectations across alternatives investing.
Operational infrastructure increasingly influences:
Version Control Issues: Multiple reporting files and manual updates can create inconsistency.
Reconciliation Bottlenecks: Manual validation processes often become increasingly resource-intensive at scale.
Limited transparency: Fragmented workflows can reduce visibility across portfolios.
Increased manual intervention: Operational teams may spend substantial time rebuilding or validating information manually.
Governance limitations: Manual processes can create challenges around auditability and operational oversight.
Many alternatives firms are increasingly investing in:
This shift is not simply about technology modernization.
It is about building operational models capable of supporting:
The firms likely to scale most effectively over the next decade may not simply be those with strong investment performance. Increasingly, they may also be the firms capable of reducing operational friction across fragmented alternatives ecosystems.
Spreadsheets remain widely used because they are flexible, familiar, and easy to adapt quickly across evolving operational workflows.
Common risks include:
Institutional investors increasingly expect stronger transparency, faster reporting, improved governance, and more scalable portfolio oversight capabilities.
Explore how FoF managers can reduce operational risk, modernize reporting, and strengten the technology foundations needed to support long-term growth.
Behind every successful FoF strategy is a growing operational burden. Discover the hidden challenges that can impact efficiency, scalability, and investor confidence.
Institutional investors expect more than periodic updates. Learn how fund of fund managers can deliver the transparency, consistency, and insights today’s LPs demand.
Get in touch to learn more about our range of services.
Please complete the form and a member of our team will be in touch with you shortly.
"*" indicates required fields
Analysis
Cross-border expansion has shifted from a growth strategy to an operational challenge defined by execution, data, and governance.
Elliott Brown
Global Head of Private Equity
April 1, 2026
Cross-border expansion is no longer a strategic milestone. It is an operating condition.
Europe is no longer just a fundraising opportunity for U.S. private markets managers. It is becoming a structural part of how capital is raised. But entering Europe changes more than investor geography. It introduces parallel regulatory regimes, distributed governance, and new reporting expectations that reshape the operating model.
This article explores what actually changes when managers operate across jurisdictions, where complexity emerges, and why execution, not access, is now the differentiator. It examines how data, reporting, and governance can fragment at scale, and what leading managers are doing to operate as a single, coherent platform across regions.
For U.S. private markets managers, Europe has become a structural component of fundraising strategy. After a period of contraction, global private capital fundraising stabilized at approximately $1.3 trillion in 2025 (Bain & Company), but capital formation remains more selective and uneven across strategies.
Domestic LP pools are no longer sufficient to absorb new allocations at prior levels. Distributions have slowed, allocation pacing has tightened, and even established managers are increasingly looking beyond the U.S for capital.
Europe presents a deep and diversified investor base. However, expansion into European markets introduces a fundamentally different operating environment.
What changes is not only where capital is sourced, but the expectations attached to it.
European institutional investors typically operate within more formalized regulatory frameworks, with heightened scrutiny on governance, reporting consistency, and data transparency. Industry surveys indicate that over 70% of institutional LPs prioritize more frequent and granular reporting—raising the operational bar for managers operating across jurisdictions.
As a result, cross-border expansion is no longer just a distribution challenge. It is an operating one.
Market entry pathways into Europe are becoming more understood.
In response, Luxembourg has become the default structuring hub for non-European managers seeking systematic access to European capital.
It offers:
This is reflected in market behavior. According to ALFI, U.S.-originated funds held over €1.2 trillion in Luxembourg as of 2025, more than any other jurisdiction.
Establishing a Luxembourg structure introduces parallel operating requirements alongside existing U.S. models—creating a multi-layered operating environment rather than a replacement of one system with another.
Cross-border complexity does not emerge at the strategy level. It emerges in the operating model.
Three fault lines consistently appear:
1. Fragmented service providers and data environments
Fund, entity, and regulatory data are distributed across administrators, AIFMs, and internal systems—often structured differently by jurisdiction.
The consequence is not simply inefficiency, but the absence of a single, consistent view of performance and risk.
2. Parallel reporting frameworks
U.S. and European reporting regimes—SEC, AIFMD, Annex IV—operate independently, with differing timelines, formats, and levels of granularity.
Firms do not transition between frameworks. They run them concurrently.
This introduces duplication, reconciliation challenges, and increased risk of inconsistency.
3. Diffused governance structures
In the U.S., control is largely centralized within the GP.
In Europe, governance extends across the AIFM, fund boards, and delegated service providers. Oversight becomes distributed across entities and jurisdictions.
Without clear alignment, firms introduce decision latency, duplicated controls, and fragmented accountability.
The compounding effect: operational drag at scale
Individually, these challenges are manageable. At scale, they compound.
The impact is not limited to operational efficiency.
In practice, these gaps shape how managers are evaluated by LPs. Inconsistent reporting, fragmented data, and diffused governance raise questions around control, transparency, and institutional readiness, particularly in cross-border structures.
In a more competitive fundraising environment, this has direct consequences. It affects a manager’s ability to raise capital, retain investor confidence, and scale strategies across jurisdictions without friction.
What begins as structural expansion can, if not addressed, become a constraint on growth.
Leading managers are shifting from a structure-led approach to an operating model-led approach.
They recognize that success in Europe is not determined by where the fund is domiciled, but by how the platform operates across jurisdictions.
This requires deliberate design:
The objective is not simplification. It is coherence.
The most advanced managers are not attempting to reduce complexity. They are building the capability to manage it—systematically.
In practice, this requires more than coordination across jurisdictions. It requires an operating model that is designed for multi-entity, multi-regime execution from the outset.
That means:
Firms that achieve this do not eliminate complexity. They control it.
This is where operational intelligence becomes a practical capability—not a concept.
It enables managers to maintain a consistent view of performance and risk, respond to increasingly detailed LP expectations, and scale without proportionate increases in operational cost.
Access to European capital is now part of life. The infrastructure exists, and the pathways are well established.
The differentiator now lies in execution.
For many managers, entering new markets is a challenge, but operating across them with consistency becomes even more challenging. Cross-border strategies introduce structural and regulatory complexity, but it is the operating model that determines whether that complexity is controlled or compounded.
This is where outcomes begin to diverge.
Firms that treat expansion as a structuring exercise often encounter fragmentation as they scale—across data, reporting, and governance. Over time, this limits visibility, slows decision-making, and undermines confidence at the LP level.
By contrast, firms that design their operating model around multi-jurisdictional execution from the outset—aligning data, reporting, and oversight—are better positioned to scale with control, maintain consistency, and meet increasing investor expectations.
This is not a secondary consideration — it is a defining one.
Managers that treat expansion as a structuring exercise often introduce fragmentation across data, reporting, and governance. Those that design their operating model for multi-jurisdiction execution scale with greater control, consistency, and transparency.
Get in touch to learn more about our range of services.
Please complete the form and a member of our team will be in touch with you shortly.
"*" indicates required fields
Analysis
As endowments portfolios grow in scale and complexity, operational discipline is becoming as critical to performance as investment allocation and manager selection. This first article examines how liquidity management, independent oversight, and operating infrastructure are reshaping how endowments govern private market portfolios.
Endowments and foundations operate with long time horizons, but the way these portfolios are governed, monitored, and defended have become increasingly complex. As investment programs expand across asset classes, vehicles, and jurisdictions, the effectiveness of governance is shaped not only by strategy, but by the operating foundations that support it.
Today, investment committees, boards of directors, and trustees are spending more time interrogating the quality of information they receive, the reliability of liquidity assumptions, and the strength of the operational frameworks underpinning decision-making. These considerations are no longer peripheral. They influence confidence, oversight, and the institution’s ability to act decisively across market cycles.
What has changed is not the objective of governance, but the operational burden required to sustain it at scale.
The endowment model, and the way it has leveraged private markets, remains relevant. What has changed is the operating environment in which that model now has to function — one defined by higher complexity, greater scrutiny and tighter operational constraints.
Endowments will continue to build on the foundations that have served them well — leveraging alumni and donor networks to identify and access top-quartile managers — but long-term performance increasingly depends on whether institutions can see, govern and act across those exposures at the portfolio level, rather than at the manager or asset-class level alone.
This shift has elevated systems, data, and operating discipline from support functions to core enablers of governance – directly influencing how confidently institutions can allocate capital, rebalance portfolios, and affirm decisions to stakeholders.
Shifting perspectives on liquidity exemplify how endowment operating models require change.
A combination of factors is reshaping how endowment managers think about liquidity. In the US, endowment income for certain universities and colleges will be subject to higher tax rates from tax years starting after 2025, with qualifying schools moving from a flat 1.4% rate to tiered rates of 4% and 8%, dependent on asset-to-student ratios. This could drive higher future demand for liquidity, alongside potential government funding cuts to some universities.
Endowment managers have also become more acutely aware of the opportunity costs created by liquidity constraints. Over the past 24 to 36 months, higher interest rates slowed exit activity and distributions, reducing flexibility at precisely the point when public markets offered opportunities to rebalance and redeploy capital.
What this period exposed was not simply a market timing issue, but a governance one: liquidity assumptions embedded in portfolio models were not always matched by reliable, consolidated information on visibility into cash flows, commitments and timing.
Large endowments have been active participants in secondary markets over the last 12 months, tapping liquidity to exit large private equity holdings and rebalance portfolios. This activity underscores the growing importance of actively managing liquidity profiles, rather than treating liquidity as a static allocation assumption.
Constructing portfolios that can weather cyclical bottlenecks in private markets distributions — and putting operational frameworks in place to support exacting cash management is becoming a defining capability for endowments operating in a more fluid regulatory, taxation and investment context.
As endowments adjust to shifting liquidity demands and navigate a private markets ecosystem that is larger and more complex, closing oversight gaps and strengthening operational capability are no longer back-office concerns. They are now central to performance management and fiduciary confidence.
Endowment investment committees are not only focused on returns, but also on portfolio resilience and transparent reporting on manager performance. Meeting those expectations requires the ability to produce independent, rigorous and consolidated portfolio reporting, rather than relying exclusively on manager-provided information. Data and reporting standardization remain elusive in private markets, and quarterly manager reports are, by nature, backward-looking. Manager reporting can also be subjective and heavily return-focused, emphasizing IRRs and distributed-to-paid-in ratios over risk-adjusted performance or portfolio-level exposures.
In crowded private markets, where manager selection and valuation oversight are increasingly complex, institutions with the ability to test assumptions and valuations independently are better positioned to invest with conviction and reassure investment committees.
Manager reporting remains a necessity, but it is not sufficient on its own.
For endowments, the objective is not to replace the GP view, but to complement it with independent insight that strengthens debate, governance and allocation decisions.
Independent, third-party administrators can provide endowments with services, technology, and expertise required to build this independent reporting capability, strengthening oversight and delivering investment-committee-ready reporting that meets institutional-grade operating standards.
As endowments move into the next phase of their evolution, operational infrastructure increasingly functions as the strategic base on which financial performance and intergenerational mandates are delivered.
Outsourced operating models, built alongside long-term administration partners rather than transactional service providers, can provide a back-office backbone that knits together mission, financial performance and governance through meticulous oversight, independent reporting and day-to-day operational discipline.
Academic research has demonstrated a clear link between governance quality and investment outcomes, showing that organizational slack reduces discipline and performance. Strong operations, by contrast, reinforce governance by ensuring that decision-makers are working from accurate, timely and controlled information.
It is no coincidence that the strongest-performing endowments increasingly view operations not as a utility, but as essential strategic infrastructure — providing the governance framework that enables financial performance while safeguarding mission continuity and public trust.
At Alter Domus, we do not focus solely on what clients require today. We work with endowments and foundations to build operating models that are resilient enough to support their needs from now and years beyond.
Endowments and foundations operate with long-term horizons, seeking not only to deliver performance in the present, but to sustain financial stability for the institutions they serve. Performance and purpose are not opposing forces — they are mutually reinforcing outcomes when supported by robust governance and institutional-grade operating infrastructure.
As portfolios grow more complex, independent specialist partners play an increasingly important role in providing the oversight, transparency and operational resilience required to realize long-term objectives—and to translate governance intent into execution.
This operational reality sets the stage for the practical execution challenges explored in Part 2.
Bridging the ABOR/IBOR GAP
Solid foundations: the infra opportunity
Get in touch to learn more about our range of services.
Please complete the form and a member of our team will be in touch with you shortly.
"*" indicates required fields
Analysis
Investment committees are demanding deeper portfolio insights and greater transparency. Discover how FoF GPs are adapting to meet evolving governance expectations.
Investment committees are asking different questions about Fund of Funds transparency because alternatives portfolios have become larger, more complex, and more strategically important within institutional investment programs.
Historically, many investment committees focused primarily on:
Those priorities still matter.
But as alternatives allocations continue growing, governance expectations are evolving.
Investment committees increasingly want visibility into:
This is reshaping operational expectations across fund of funds structures.
Preqin forecasts the alternatives industry will exceed $30 trillion in assets under management by 2030, increasing the strategic importance of alternatives oversight across institutional portfolios.
As portfolios scale, investment committees face growing pressure around:
Institutional investors increasingly want reporting capable of supporting:
This represents a meaningful shift in how transparency itself is being evaluated.
Why traditional reporting models are becoming less sufficient
Many traditional reporting structures were designed around:
Today, many investment committees expect:
MSCI has noted that transparency and comparability across private markets continue to lag the pace of industry growth despite rising institutional adoption.
This is increasing pressure on Fund of Funds managers to improve operational reporting consistency and portfolio visibility.
Portfolio transparency: visibility beneath the fund layer itself.
Reporting consistency: more comparable information across managers and structures.
Exposure visibility: clearer understanding of concentrations and overlap.
Governance confidence: greater trust in reporting quality and operational resilience.
Faster insight generation: more responsive reporting and portfolio oversight capabilities.
Transparency is increasingly becoming more than a reporting exercise.
It is becoming part of institutional governance infrastructure.
Operational visibility increasingly influences:
The firms likely to differentiate most effectively may not simply be those delivering strong investment performance.
Increasingly, they may also be the firms capable of supporting stronger investment oversight through scalable transparency.
Alternatives portfolios have become larger and more strategically important, increasing governance and oversight expectations.
Underlying managers often report information inconsistently across formats, timelines, and taxonomies, making consolidated visibility more difficult.
Consistent reporting supports stronger governance, concentration analysis, portfolio oversight, and investment decision-making.
Explore how greater transparency, enhanced portfolio visibility, and deeper operational insights help fund of fund managers strengthen governance, improve decision making, and manage risk with confidence.
Hidden exposures can be difficult to identify across multi-manager portfolios. We explore how FoF GPs can improve concentration risk oversight through greater transparency.
Better operational visibility gives fund of funds GPs the confidence to make faster, more informed portfolio decisions across increasingly complex investment structures.
Get in touch to learn more about our range of services.
Please complete the form and a member of our team will be in touch with you shortly.
"*" indicates required fields
Blog
Private markets firms are scaling faster than their operating models. A new approach to operating intelligence is becoming essential to support better decisions, stronger governance, and long-term growth.
Charlotte Hogg
Chief Executive Officer
March 5, 2025
In my recent whitepaper on the Operating Intelligence – A New Opportunity for Investors, I explored a structural challenge emerging across private markets: as firms scale, their data, governance and operational infrastructure often fail to scale with them.
That paper focused on the nature of the issue — the limits of legacy operating models.
But stepping back as CEO, I believe the implications run deeper still. The problem is not simply operational inefficiency. It is becoming a strategic fault line.
So here is a broader perspective on what operating intelligence now means for leadership, resilience and competitive differentiation in the next phase of private markets.
Over the past decade, the industry has matured at extraordinary speed. Firms have expanded across strategies, geographies and products. LP expectations have risen. Regulatory scrutiny has increased. And the pace of decision-making has accelerated.
Yet behind the performance, many operating models still look remarkably familiar.
For too long, the operational layer of private markets has been treated as a necessary function. Something to manage. Something to outsource. Something to keep running in the background.
This paradigm is coming to an end. As private markets scale, operating models are no longer a back-office concern. They are becoming a strategic advantage.
Private markets have always been complex. Cross-border structures. Multiple entities. Different reporting requirements. Unique fund terms. Asset-level nuance.
What has changed is the scale at which that complexity now operates.
Many firms are running more funds, across more strategies, with more portfolio companies and more investors than ever before. They are expected to deliver faster reporting, deeper transparency, and stronger governance.
And they are doing this while operating in a world where data is everywhere, but insight is not.
The result is simple: private markets firms are being asked to make faster decisions, with greater confidence, across a much more complex environment.
Most firms don’t have a shortage of information.
They have too many systems, too many workflows, and too many disconnected sources of truth.
Information exists across fund accounting, portfolio reporting, investor communications, loan administration, and multiple third-party platforms. But too often it is fragmented, delayed, and difficult to connect.
In practice, that means teams spend time reconciling rather than understanding. Reviewing rather than anticipating. Explaining rather than acting.
And crucially, it means insight can arrive too late to influence the decisions that matter most. This is not a technology issue alone. It is an operating model issue.
Fund administration has historically been defined by execution.
Accurate books. Timely closes. Reliable reporting. Strong controls. Professional service. Those fundamentals remain non-negotiable.
But today, what firms need from their operating partners is expanding.
They need visibility across their business, their funds and their portfolios – delivered with speed and accessibility.
They need insight that reflects how they actually invest. Insight that aligns with their strategy, their structures and their competitive strengths.
They need operating models that support decision-making, not just reporting.
They need earlier signals. Less reconciliation. More forward-looking clarity. This is where fund administration begins to shift from service delivery to operating intelligence
When we talk about intelligence, we do not mean another portal or another layer of generic reporting.
We mean something more fundamental: the ability to bring together data, workflows, and expertise into a single coherent operating view.
True intelligence identifies exceptions early, reduces friction, and delivers insight at the exact point where decisions are made – tailored to a firm’s strategy, risk appetite, and investment approach.
That means a firm’s intellectual property must be embedded in the insights themselves. And critically, intelligence combines technology with human expertise to strengthen governance, reduce risk, and support scale.
This is not a shift driven by fashion. It is driven by necessity.
As the industry evolves, the relationship between GPs and service providers must evolve too.
The future belongs to operating partners, not transactional vendors.
Partners who understand the realities of private markets. Who can deliver consistently across strategies and geographies. Who can help simplify what can be simplified, standardize what must be standardized, and build trusted foundations beneath every process.
And who can use modern technology to help firms operate with greater clarity, confidence, and resilience.
Private markets firms will continue to grow. Complexity will continue to increase. Expectations will continue to rise.
The firms that thrive will be those that build operating models designed for what comes next.
Operating models that support decision-making, not just reporting. Operating models that reduce risk, not just process it. Operating models that scale without breaking.
At Alter Domus, we believe fund administration is becoming something bigger: the operating infrastructure of private markets. A crucial source of data and insights to drive value for investors
And our responsibility is to help our clients shape that future.
Not by adding noise. But by bringing clarity.
Not by replacing expertise. But by amplifying it.
Not by offering more tools. But by building a better operating model.
Because in the next era of private markets, performance will always matter. Expectations will rise.
For us as fund administrators, the bar is rising even more. Great service and a relentless focus on delivering new sources of value will matter even more.
Podcast
Our inaugural episode of our Alter Domus Podcast features Tim Ruxton and Curtis Beyer in conversation with Thomas Morris, CEO of The Reporting Company, discussing how AI-enabled workflows for private credit and CLO regulatory reports provided by Alter Domus are reducing this process from hours to minutes, improving validation accuracy, and strengthening data integrity without sacrificing human oversight.
Thomas and the team examine everything from cross-border regulatory pressures, data fragmentation and common taxonomies, AI mapping and validation in production environments, and the strategic decision to build internally or partner.
Tim and Curtis also explore what this shift means for private credit operating models−and the strategic decisions firms can no longer postpone. The conversation moves beyond technology to the competitive implications of getting reporting infrastructure right.
Watch below or on directly on Youtube or Spotify.
In candid conversations with GPs, LPs and industry partners across private equity, private credit and real assets, we unpack the trends reshaping the industry – from AI and data transformation to regulation, scale and evolving operating models.
If you’re building, scaling or rethinking your organization, this is the conversation you need to hear.
Subscribe today to gain early access to each new episode of the Alter Domus Podcast.
"*" indicates required fields
