S&P Global has partnered with private markets portfolio manager Cambridge Associates and consulting firm Mercer to build a platform for private markets performance analytics, set to launch in beta by the end of this year. According to S&P Global, the collaboration “will transform how general partners and limited partners in private markets contribute critical market intelligence”.
The move underscores the growing importance of private markets share of financial assets alongside public markets, which used to be S&P’s mainstay. It also emphasises the continuing shortfall in performance analytics from private market firms.
According to Sally Moore, chief client officer at S&P Global, “fragmented data and inconsistent reporting standards are creating operational inefficiencies and limiting informed investment decisions”. And Rob Ansari, global head of analytics and portfolio solutions at Mercer, says that “for too long, our clients have struggled with inconsistent reporting formats and fragmented data”.
There are weightier criticisms of such shortcomings.
In a June 3 posting on the European Central Bank’s supervision blog, Claudia Buch, chair of the ECB Supervisory Board, highlighted the dearth of reliable and consistent data in private markets, saying that important risk and performance metrics are often unavailable or hard to compare.
In March, the European Investment Fund launched its own portal to improve transparency in private markets, noting that “traditionally, investors in private markets have been challenged by a lack of robust data”.
A month later, UK private markets gatekeeper Treble Peak said that transparency remains the most pressing issue for private markets, as it “inspires confidence, while a lack of it breeds scepticism”.
Such scepticism revolves around private market firms’ claims about their performance. Thanks to their private characteristics as well as the less organised and supervised nature of their relatively young business, private market players have a reputation for manipulating and finessing their performance numbers, especially when marketing to potential investors.
Developments like last year’s decision by the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals to annul a US Securities and Exchange Commission rule imposing greater transparency on private markets players will only have encouraged that scepticism.
Opacity around performance may be a historic artefact of the industry that private markets players have happily made use of over the years. But it only impedes the industry now. As with many other areas, it’s time that private markets outgrew it.
