S&P Global Market Intelligence has expanded its private markets data and technology platform iLevel with the addition of AI Document Search, a module that is built on large language models (LLMs) trained specifically to aid participants in the fast-growing alternative assets sector.
The new tool enables general partners (GPs), who manage funds on behalf of limited partner (LPs) investors, to interrogate the data they hold on their assets using natural language prompts. The innovation is aimed at helping asset managers and limited partners (LPs) make better-informed decisions without having to spend hours poring over financial documents issued by their portfolio funds and companies.
Chris Sparenberg, S&P Global Head of iLEVEL, said Document Search reduces the manual work clients go through to obtain insights.
“We provide document and data collection services to iLEVEL clients and we collect a tremendous amount of information on their behalf,” Sparenberg told Data Management Insight. “Due to the volume of unstructured data in their environments, iLEVEL users still need to access underlying documents to analyse sentiment, trends and other non-standard information.
“Document Search is a way to remove some of those steps from the process and reduce the need to go and manually review documents. Clients want more data. They have access to it, but paradoxically, it’s locked in PDFs. And so this is the way to bring all of that universe of important information to their fingertips.”
Data and technology vendors are clamouring to bring the sort of transparency to private markets as investors are used to in public markets as they seek to fill an information gap to a sector that Preqin estimates will account for more almost US$25 trillion by 2028.
Rising Demand
Startups like Juniper Square and Alkymi are jostling with established data companies including CUSIP and NeoXam to serve the new influx of investors eager to capitalise on the higher returns in private equity, private credit, venture funds and property as volatility plagues mainstream capital markets.
iLEVEL was introduced in 2008 as one of the first products to bring transparency to private market investors, beginning life as a template-based tool that LPs and GPs could send to portfolio companies in order to obtain critical investment-decisioning data. It has since been enhanced into a multi-faceted platform that helps both sets of market participants better manage and monitor their investments.
S&P Global already offers a search feature in iLevel that’s largely focussed on rules-based inquiries of entity and document names. Sparenberg stresses that iLevel Document Search’s differentiator is its LLM, which he said has been created especially for the one-niche asset types.
Proprietary LLMs
Clients can use Document Search by entering a query within the platform and the LLMs – which are based on Anthropic’s Claude model suite – queries all of the documents in the company’s own ring-fenced iLevel data store to generate a response.
“The biggest difference is a lot of LLMS will be generalist in terms of their capabilities,” he said from his office in Atlanta, Georgia. “Ours, thanks to our internal expertise and that of the clients who use our platform every day can be smarter and are actually built for the purpose of asset management and portfolio monitoring. It’s the quality of the queries that informs the quality of results.”
As well as benefiting from natural language processes capabilities, iLevel Document Search users can take advantage of features that enable the granular annotations of data to make traceability easier by linking every data point to original sources. Sparenberg stresses that tool is permissions based so that access to results is strictly protected to maintain confidentiality of sensitive materials.
With the data gathered via the new search facility, GPs can create their own portfolio models, populating them with all the information applicable to their funds’ underlying assets.
“There are things that don’t come out [of the documents and PDFs] during standard data extraction, and this gives clients a way to, on the fly, query that additional information, ask questions, and do things that enhance their workflows,” Sparenberg said.
LPs Welcome
The service isn’t restricted to GPs. LPs can also use Document Search to query their databases on the funds in which they are invested, gathering insights into performance and poring over GP letters to get a sense of how asset managers’ thinking is evolving.
Sparenberg said that the latest addition to the iLevel platform is part of a broader programme of development for the offering, and that S&P Global would continue responding to the needs of its clients.
“We spent a lot of time actually talking to clients to validate this concept before we started building and what we found was that document and data volume – even though we solved for much of it and the parts of it that can be highly operationalised is what specialise in – it’s still a topic for our them,” he said. “They want to know how they can better marshal all the information they have access to? How can they more dynamically manage the investments that they’ve made? How can they interact with other stakeholders with certainty?”
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