The Private Markets Information Problem — And Why It's About to Change

Private markets are approaching $15 trillion of AUM. They've become integral to institutional portfolios, increasingly important in wealth channels, and central to how the global economy finances itself. And yet, the information infrastructure supporting the asset class — the data, transparency, benchmarking, comparability, and analytical tools — is underbuilt by an order of magnitude relative to public markets. This isn't a technical problem. It's a structural one, and it's about to change.

Every other financial asset class of comparable size has mature information infrastructure. Equities have Bloomberg, Refinitiv, FactSet, and free tools like Yahoo Finance. Public credit has sophisticated spread analytics, real-time pricing, and standardized covenant databases. Mutual funds have Morningstar. Real estate has MSCI, CBRE data, and CoStar. Each of these platforms took 20-40 years to build — but each reflects the information needs of professional and retail investors who demand data, comparability, and analytical depth.

Private markets, despite their size, operate in an environment that looks more like equities in 1975 than 2025.

What "the information problem" actually is

The information deficit in private markets manifests in several specific ways:

1. Fund-level data is fragmented. A financial advisor trying to compare three private credit evergreen funds typically has to pull data from three different GP websites, in three different formats, with three different reporting conventions, and attempt comparison without standardized benchmarks. Institutional allocators with in-house research teams manage this with resource. Everyone else doesn't.

2. Comparability is artisanal. Performance reporting in private markets uses multiple conventions that aren't directly comparable. A 10% net IRR, a 10% net annualized TWRR, a 10% trailing one-year return, and a 10% since-inception MOIC-equivalent annualized return are all different numbers — but they're all sometimes reported as simply "10% net return." Advisors who accept reported numbers at face value are systematically mis-comparing.

3. Fee transparency is partial. As discussed in prior posts, the fee stack in evergreen vehicles includes multiple layers totaling 300-400 bps that aren't always clearly communicated. Tools to benchmark fees across funds — to know whether a specific fund's all-in cost is in the top or bottom quartile of its peer group — are limited.

4. Historical data is thin. Public markets have decades of standardized historical pricing, volumes, earnings, and other fundamental data. Private markets databases have partial coverage, often biased toward large and successful funds (survivorship bias), with limited detail on discontinued vehicles.

5. Real-time monitoring is nearly non-existent. Public market investors can observe daily performance, sector rotations, credit spread movements. Private market investors typically wait 45-90 days post quarter-end for reported data, receive it in PDFs, and then manually extract what they need.

6. Regulatory disclosures are asymmetric. US public BDCs file sophisticated 10-Ks and 10-Qs. Most non-US private vehicles file much less. The same asset class — direct lending to middle-market companies — is disclosed very differently depending on fund structure and domicile.

Why it persists

The information asymmetry is not an accident. It serves several incumbents:

GPs benefit from opacity. Difficulty in cross-fund comparison reduces fee pressure. Limited transparency on individual deal performance obscures manager dispersion. Historical reporting that allocators can't independently validate makes manager attribution analysis difficult. These are real economic benefits to GPs, and the industry has had little reason to voluntarily invest in dismantling them.

Platforms benefit from scarcity. Where information tools have emerged, they've typically been expensive, institutional-only, and built by incumbents with limited incentive to democratize access. Morningstar, the closest analog in public markets, built its business on the democratization of fund data. The equivalent in private markets has been slower to develop precisely because institutional willingness to pay has been sufficient to support narrow coverage.

Regulators have been deferential. Private markets have historically been framed as "professional-investor-only" territory, with lighter regulatory disclosure requirements than public markets. As retail access has grown through evergreen vehicles, regulatory expectations have started to catch up — but the gap remains.

Why it's about to change

Three forces are converging to reshape the information environment:

1. Retail and wealth channel pressure. As private markets products reach wealth advisors and retail investors at scale, the audience demanding standardized data, comparison tools, and analytical depth has expanded by an order of magnitude. Advisors working with 100 clients across a range of portfolios cannot do bespoke analysis on every private markets holding. They need standardization.

2. Regulatory momentum. SEC private fund adviser reforms, ESMA initiatives on retail private markets disclosure, and similar developments globally are pushing standardization. Regulatory momentum around retail suitability for private markets products is forcing disclosure improvements.

3. Platform economics. The market opportunity for comprehensive private markets information has grown to the point where multiple new entrants can build sustainable businesses. Private markets data and analytics is projected to be a multi-billion dollar addressable market within the next decade. Where incumbents have been slow, new platforms — including this one — are emerging.

What a fixed information environment looks like

The end state for private markets information infrastructure, drawing analogies to public markets, likely includes:

Standardized fund-level data. Consistent fields, consistent conventions, consistent reporting frequency across all funds in a given category. What Morningstar achieved for mutual funds needs to exist for evergreen private markets vehicles.

Benchmarking and peer comparison. The ability to see where a specific fund's fees, returns, risk, or portfolio characteristics sit relative to peer funds. Not just for institutional allocators with research teams — but for every advisor with a client question about whether their investment is well-positioned.

Transparent fee decomposition. Visibility into the full fee stack, peer comparison on each layer, and the ability to compare all-in cost across comparable vehicles. This alone would likely compress industry fees by 50-150 bps on average over a decade — a meaningful structural outcome.

Underlying holdings data (at appropriate aggregation). Not full holdings disclosure for every investor on every fund — GPs have legitimate interests in portfolio privacy. But aggregate metrics: sector exposure, geographic distribution, vintage pacing, LTV distributions in credit funds, concession duration profiles in infrastructure funds. This data exists. It's just not available at standard industry scale.

Historical consistency. Long time-series data with methodological consistency, allowing meaningful cycle analysis and through-cycle manager evaluation. Survivorship-biased, partial, or inconsistent data sets fail the purpose.

Integration with portfolio construction tools. Private markets holdings flowing into the same portfolio analytics tools that advisors use for public markets. Most advisors today manage private markets holdings as manual overlays on portfolio tools that were designed for public markets. This is ending.

What advisors and allocators should do now

Three practical disciplines, given where the information environment sits today:

1. Demand more. Every fund under consideration should be evaluated with a set of specific data questions. Not every question will be answered in full the first time. But cumulative pressure from allocators and advisors is what will move standards forward. Accept "we don't report that" as an answer about the fund as much as about the data.

2. Use emerging platforms. As dedicated private markets information platforms develop, incorporate them into diligence processes. The current state is far from ideal, but it's meaningfully better than unassisted research, and using these tools both improves decision quality and reinforces their development.

3. Think about the data environment in 2030. The advisors and allocators best-positioned for the next decade of private markets growth are those who are building their process assuming the information environment will be materially better by 2030 — and who are starting now to use the data and tools that will define the category.

The takeaway

The information problem in private markets is real, structural, and consequential. It's shaped who could participate historically, how fees have been set, how risks have been understood, and how capital has been allocated.

It's also changing. The combination of retail demand, regulatory pressure, and new platform economics is creating the conditions for the kind of information infrastructure buildout that reshaped public markets in the 1980s and 1990s. The participants who recognize this shift, demand better information, and adapt their processes accordingly will be best positioned for the decade ahead.

This isn't abstract. Every basis point of fee savings, every improvement in manager selection, every avoided mistake from clearer liquidity understanding — these are real economic outcomes for investors. The information problem is, ultimately, a returns problem. Solving it is about to matter more than it has at any point in the history of the asset class.