Getting the Private Market Updates That Get You Ahead

In early March, Charles Schwab announced completion of its $660 million acquisition of technology platform Forge Global. More than just an expansion into a lineup of products, this move hinted at where the wealth management industry is headed. As private market investments continue to claim space in client portfolios, firms must provide the technological backbone to support both clients and advisors.

With its deal for Forge, Schwab aims to give its registered investment advisor partners and their clients streamlined access to private markets investments alongside the necessary infrastructure and information to help them understand what they own.

Merrill Lynch and Bank of America Private Bank took a similar approach last year to launch the Alts Expanded Program, which allows for better vetting of private markets offerings for ultra-wealthy clients. Together, these steps signify an increasing understanding that without a robust infrastructure backing it, private market access loses some of its appeal.

Even so, these moves have been more of an industry exception than the rule. As private markets expand to a broader pool of investors, an operational gap has become more evident, and firms are now racing to close it.

Developing the Infrastructure

With private markets scaling and more clients entering into asset classes such as private equity, private credit and real estate, advisors lacking the infrastructure to authenticate valuations and explain what is driving outcomes will have to reckon with an inability to defend their allocation decisions against headline-driven sentiment.

“For advisors moving into private markets, risk transparency has gone from a nice-to-have to a baseline requirement for responsible allocation,” wrote Dmitri Sedov, chief data and analytics officerof Allvue Systems, a software company servicing private market asset managers, in an email. “Surface-level volatility metrics routinely obscure what’s actually happening inside a portfolio.”

The advisors best positioned when the credit cycle turns, he added, are those who closed the visibility gap before they needed to.

Beyond the Spreadsheet 

Yann Magnan, co-founder and chief executive of 73 Strings, an AI-driven valuation service, remembers as recently as six years ago when private markets relied on Excel, email and manual valuation processes. Working that way was inefficient and risky. “We lose a lot of time,” he said.

Financial advisors won’t use platforms such as 73 Strings directly, as the software is built for general partners, but its speed reaches advisors’ clients indirectly, through faster NAV updates on the funds they hold.

For advisors, the practical takeaway is a due-diligence question, not a new tool. As retailization welcomes more investors into interval funds and evergreen structures, clients increasingly expect valuation frequency closer to public-market norms. It is a pace legacy, quarterly-cycle processes weren’t built for, said Magnan.

Firms like 73 Strings provide technology that can more quickly and effectively extract data, monitor and calculate valuations for the private capital industry, streamline middle-office processes and allow for deeper and more timely messaging to clients on performance.

Advisors evaluating private fund managers should now be asking how often those managers refresh valuations, according to Magnan. They can also look into what technology underpins that cadence, particularly for clients who expect more real-time visibility into their holdings.

Time-wise, the influx of retail and high-net-worth clients has changed how the general partners who manage these offerings are expected to deliver information.

Gone are the days when six months was an acceptable reporting timeline, said Magnan. Now, the expectation for information is “more like a few days after the end of the quarter [or] the end of the month.”

Not All In Just Yet 

Despite the proliferation of new tools and platforms, transformation is uneven, and significant gaps remain. According to Allvue Systems’ 2026 GP Outlook Survey, 92% of firms described their own data as only moderately well-organized or worse, and 64% said they remain reliant on Excel, despite investing in specialized systems.

Deeper transparency will set teams apart. As more clients express interest in private markets, there will be a learning curve, and getting ahead of it will set teams up for success. The industry, which has lived by the spreadsheet, will have to adjust, and quickly, according to Magnan.

Closing the Gap 

With improved ratings and analytics tools from the likes of BlackRock and Morningstar, clients are getting weekly and daily reporting where just a few years ago those reports were happening on a quarterly basis, Magnan noted. Investor expectations around timeliness and depth of those reports have thus evolved as well.

AI has quickly emerged as an essential resource for processing large data volumes and uncovering anything relevant that humans may have missed. It can be especially useful, according to Magnan, for scenario modeling and risk simulations. It enables advisors to advise their clients much better, much faster, with less time lag, and with improved, more up-to-date materials.

Private market managers appear to have taken note of these downstream effects.

Magnan says very few firms he has talked to used AI tools just 18 months ago.

“Now, it’s the other way around,” he said. “I don’t know of many GPs that I’ve been talking to recently that don’t have a Claude or ChatGPT enterprise license.”

This article was originally published by Financial Advisor IQ and written by Grace Williams: https://www.financialadvisoriq.com/c/5206664/741954