Capital-market volatility, squeezed margins and geopolitical tensions are encouraging asset managers to look more broadly across asset classes to spread risk and increase returns.
Private markets and other alternative assets have been huge beneficiaries of this trend and are likely to continue gaining share of invested capital, with Preqin estimating that investment in private markets could reach $24.5 trillion by 2028.
Managing these investments requires accurate, timely data across both public and private assets. However, that data isn’t always readily available.
In response, a number of vendors have boosted their data and technology offerings to provide visibility into private markets and alternative assets. Here are 10 that have recently enriched their offerings through the addition of new products and services or through acquisitions.
Bloomberg
While the financial data behemoth has adapted many of its vast suite of financial data tools for application to private markets investments and investment management, it has also created tools geared specifically towards such investors.
Among them, its Bloomberg Public Market Equivalent (PME) model enables clients to benchmark private equity portfolios to public equity performance. Also, recently, it launched a Syndicated Leveraged Loan Index to provide transparency into one of the most opaque corners of capital markets. For this, the US-based provider has harnessed its huge financial data troves and fixed-income expertise to build an index that covers 1,300 leveraged loans with a market value of US$1.3 trillion.The gauge is part of a new Syndicated Loans Data Solutions offering that covers 74,000 active global loan tranches, is intended to help clients benchmark loan-only funds, enable them to create custom indices and construct passive products such as exchange-traded funds.
Cardo AI
Private credit and asset-based financing (ABF) technology specialist Cardo AI uses artificial intelligence-supported data and technology to bring order to the fragmented and “outdated manual” data and technology processes within the US$40 trillion private lending space.
On a single platform, the Milan-based start-up offers general and limited partners (GPs and LPs) pre- and post-deal analytics, provides data tapes, streamlines due diligence and enables portfolio interrogation. Its services also include data pipeline management, data surveillance and data sourcing as well as data transformation.
The company, which was founded in 2018, recently announced a US$15 million Series A funding round co-led by Blackstone Innovations Investments, Blackstone’s early-stage strategic investment arm, FINTOP Capital and ****JAM FINTOP.
LSEG
The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) has built up a portfolio of data products aimed at helping private markets and alternatives investors make better informed decisions. Among them, its Private Company Profiles and Financial feed offers in-depth profiles and other details on 17.5 million closely held companies, including private equity portfolio and venture-backed firms.
It recently joined a growing list of major vendors and institutions that have launched alternative markets data products with the announcement of a collaboration with private-market specialist Dun & Bradstreet to help users better identify opportunities and risks within the space.
The tie-up will enable LSEG to leverage Dun & Bradstreet’s proprietary D-U-N-S Number regime, which attaches an identifier code to about 580 million private companies around the world. It’s anticipated that the mapping of LSEG data to D-U-N-S Numbers will help financial institutions, which largely have systems built on the standardised data rigour of public markets, to participate in the less structured alternatives space.CEPRES
German data and technology company CEPRES provides market, company and deals data on 131,000 private equity-backed companies, culled from 6,000 general partners (GPs) and limited partners (LPs), valued at US$50 trillion across 12,000 funds.
Its products include Market Intelligence, a source of look-through data that helps clients make better-informed investment decisions. DealEdge is an advisory product that gives investors visibility into upcoming deals, enabling analysis of which ones offer the most opportunities. Its Solactive CEPRES US Private Equity Industry Replicator Index provides a vehicle for exposure to the North American buyout funds by mirroring their performance against the Solactive GBS United States 500 fund of publicly listed companies.
For limited partners, which comprise the world’s largest asset owners and institutions, CEPRES offers data on the underlying assets of general partner funds; it provides the tools to test investment theses using fund, deal and asset-level analyses; and, deploys predictive models to help mitigate risks.
Dun & Bradstreet
Through its huge business advisory activities, Dun & Bradstreet has gathered an enviable store of data on millions of private companies, which is leverages in risk management and other data products for investors.
The company’s signature service is its D-U-N-S Number, which assigns an identifier code to companies, helping investors overcome the absence of a globally recognised legal identifier system for entities, which prevents investors from linking information on assets, corporate events and financial data to individual companies.
BlueFlame AI
BlueFlame AI’s Nexus lets firms unlock information stored in board decks, fund documents and other unstructured sources, then parse it into a form so that it can be ingested into their systems, tabulated and queried. It uses a variety of large language models (LLMs) to establish the best answers to queries and makes the outputs available in multiple ways, including on spreadsheets and through APIs. The platform builds on the two-year old company’s integration platform and AI tools.
BlueFlame AI began building its platform about 20 months ago and it launched a year ago. The company already counts investment management firms including Lightyear Capital and Charlesbank among its clients and has a workforce of 25 based in New York. While most of BlueFlame AI’s clients are in the alternatives space, about a quarter of them are hedge funds that focus on listed firms and that the company has also begun working with investment banks and sell-side operators.
Nexus supports and integrates clients’ own unstructured data, their structured enterprise data and market data feeds to give transparency across the assets they manage. That can also be combined with publicly available data such as regulatory filings and the major search engines’ news feeds.
S&P Global
S&P Global Market Intelligence has brought together a slew of data management tools and expertise to target private market and ESG investors. Its flagship iLevel Portfolio Monitoring product is a single-source platform in which GP and LP clients can gather data and monitor and analyse their portfolios. It was recently enriched with its Automated Data Ingestion (ADI) tool, which helps portfolio companies upload documents and reports so that generative artificial intelligence-led technology can identify, extract and analyse relevant information to help in a range of use cases.
RiskGauge Reports provides assessments of credit risk for more than 52 million private and public companies and fund performance can be benchmarked with the use of Preqin and Cambridge Associates data and analytical tools embedded in iLevel.
Apex Group
With the recent acquisition of Flow, Apex Group has expanded its private markets data and technology capabilities, which cover fund administration, ESG reporting, investor engagement and digital infrastructure. Flow gives Apex clients virtual data rooms, digital onboarding and investor portals. Fund managers can manage the lifecycle of their funds while investors have access to more than 1,000 funds and 20,000-plus LPs.
Its purchase of MJ Hudson’s ESG software and advisory team has also boosted its sustainability operations, with more than 150 experts available to advise companies on their CSRD compliance requirements to provide the most accurate data for regulators and investors. This supports an ESG data-as-a-service offering tailored to private markets, which features information gathered from more than 400 GPs and 1,500 portfolio companies.
ACA Group
The New York-based company launched its ACA Vantage for ESG platform in 2022 after acquiring ESG data specialist Ethos. The new iteration enables greater configuration of data and analytics to suit specific use cases and strategies. ACA Vantage for ESG is artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled and used by thousands of the company’s clients.
ACA Vantage for ESG offers data quality capabilities by bringing together the information that private clients need most. The SaaS-based tool enables the seamless use of ESG data from collection through to analysis and reporting. It is built on a model of providing clients with only the data they need for their specific use cases.
Subscribe to our newsletter
