📝 The AGM Op-Ed: How consolidating data enhances the full LP to GP experience
Views from the field with Arcesium's Private Markets Head Cesar Estrada
Private markets are at an inflection point. Growing appetite for private investments is compelling firms to pursue innovative strategies, launch competitive products, enter new markets, and differentiate their business model. Yet as firms expand, many are colliding with an explosion of data, fragmented systems, error-prone processes, and cost growth.
Arcesium is a global financial technology company delivering pre- and post-investment operations and enterprise data management solutions designed to systematize the most complex workflows.
Arcesium was built from a platform developed and tested by investment and technology development firm, the D. E. Shaw group, and launched as a joint venture with Blackstone Alternative Asset Management. J.P. Morgan, another large client, later made a strategic investment in the company, helping Arcesium further its mission: to power the entire investment lifecycle.
This week’s AGM Op-Ed is brought to you by Arcesium.
If you want to learn how Arcesium is helping asset managers transform their post-investment processes from reactive to proactive, please enjoy the perspectives below from Arcesium’s Private Markets Head Cesar Estrada.
How consolidating data enhances the full LP to GP experience
By Cesar Estrada, Private Markets Head, Arcesium
Tensions have always existed in private markets between general partners (GP) and limited partners (LP) over the transparency of information. Private markets are, by design, characterized by a certain opacity. As long as robust return numbers came in every quarter, LPs would give their GPs space to operate. This opacity provides GPs with the flexibility to manage investments over five-to-seven-year horizons without being forced into fire sales. GPs would walk a line, careful not to give too much information that could make its way around. But the line has become finer. The GP-LP relationship has morphed into something more intricate since GPs manage increasing complexity across funds, asset classes, and service providers. LPs are now in a position to ask for, and feel entitled to, more transparency.
Market structures have changed, technology has changed, and competition for capital has sharpened. Private market managers can satisfy the new GP-LP relationship dynamics and differentiate by placing an imperative on crystal-clear and instant investor communications, enhanced transparency, and flexible optionality. We’re talking about the unencumbered flow of information, and data consolidation is the means.
Mandate for change of the GP-LP relationship: scrutiny, competition, expectations
The GP-LP experience is evolving whether the firms are on board or not; firms may as well wag the dog instead of getting wagged by rapid change. A convergence of forces has ramped up the urgency. When market conditions are stable, transparency is mostly about oversight, but in times of liquidity crisis, it becomes a shield... and a sword. While we wouldn’t call the current level of private credit scrutiny a crisis, no one wants to be the last one out the door in a liquidity rush. Still, there are signs of struggle in what Larry Fink argues will be a culling of the herd, in which weaker managers will be shaken out while institutional demand remains strong [i]. But most of all, GPs are locked in fierce competition for private market capital in an environment where so much of the capital is being scooped up by so few firms.
To win, GPs are striving to meet rigorous LP demands for daily data on portfolio company metrics, cash flows, performance drivers, and fee breakdowns. LPs are pressuring managers to generate distributions from earlier vintage funds. LPs want stronger benchmarking, clearer structures, easier exits, and custom risk limits. In sum, they want greater control, optionality, and a more active role.
Mandate for data transformation
GPs’ transformation of the modern private market LP experience begins and ends with data consolidation. Why? Only 18% of front-office teams at institutional investors can obtain timely data access without manual intervention, and only 27% of firms report having a single source of truth for their data [ii]. The financial services industry has a substantive data problem. It has been almost impossible to keep up with the rocketing volumes of financial data. But it’s not merely the volume.
Investment and reference data spread across various internal systems, administrators, and custodians appear in inconsistent formats, definitions, and timing. This fog of fragmentation results in blindness and bottlenecks, missing values or duplicates, and necessitates time-intensive, error-ridden manual intervention. Data consolidation enhances every touchpoint in the GP-LP relationship and bridges the transparency gap so that data can flow freely. Since data is as much a strategic asset as the dollar today, the firms that modernize data infrastructure create a competitive data advantage.
Observe and report for accountability and transparency
Investor satisfaction with quarterly portfolio company updates, capital account statements, and fund-level statements is a thing of the past. Their experiences suffer when they receive delayed or inconsistent reports and lack of look-through into underlying exposures. According to CFA Institute, global investment professionals said their top concern was frequency and accuracy of valuation reporting in private markets; with 37% indicating that it had consequential problems or failures [iii]. Solid reporting moves the needle on both sides of the ledger. LPs will increase allocations to those firms with better reporting, while also pulling their money when plagued with scattershot reporting. GPs can win and retain investors by supplying full transparency at three different LP milestones: when allocating to a manager, when positions move from healthy to concerning, and when deciding to either redeem, roll, or re-up. LPs want to slice data by commitment size or region, drill into cash flows at the investment level, and see real-time capital balances. Three in four LPs want performance data daily or on-demand [iv].
However, this falls into the easier said than done category.
Data under a single umbrella to turn noise into music
The terms unified, centralized, synchronized, and consolidated all mean the same thing in data science: automatically assembling a billion-piece puzzle continuously, all day, every day, so you can see the full picture, the total fund view. Without normalized, standardized data, getting basic portfolio position size for a lending platform can take internal teams up to a week. When an organization can bring all the information across administrators, custodians, and internal systems into a single governed layer, it can finally put the data to good use in driving returns. However, only the most advanced data foundation — fluent in the language of markets and finance, also known as investment-native — can unify information that arrives in different formats, structured and unstructured, private and public, from so many functional point systems.
The technology’s superpower is its capability to identify common data entities and their relationships across systems and map them accordingly into a unified framework. Thus, it automates the centralization and standardization of financial information for the entire organization, to prepare it for what we call “data curation.” An investment-native data infrastructure layer is the modern mechanism that makes clear portfolio visibility, comparing like-for-like, and look-through possible.
GPs bridging the transparency gap to gain a competitive edge
Look-through analysis is a differentiating capability, allowing firms to drill through from top-level holdings down to underlying deals, transactions, and cash flows across various vehicles. Ironically, to disaggregate the full portfolio for look-through analysis, a firm’s data platform must first fully aggregate the unified data view.
Subsequently, downstream risk management, treasury, and reconciliation teams can gather the data needed for their regular, custom, or on-demand reporting needs. Managers can calculate performance faster since they don’t have to examine multiple systems (e.g. public markets assets and private market assets) or crunch numbers from multiple reports. A GP with these capabilities gains an edge in speed and service levels; while LPs gain a granular understanding of where that investment fits in their broader objectives. Moreover, they can customize reporting tools for their different LPs, each of which has unique needs, specific compliance demands, and different levels of complexity. For example, pension funds need granular asset-liability matching data to ensure their investments align with their actuarial payout requirements, which factors into several regulatory filings. This level of clarity helps LPs identify hidden concentration risks, such as unintentional overlapping bets in the same sector or geography across different vehicles.
Win the competition for capital
The industry has a growing incentive to standardize these data exchanges to maintain institutional and retail interest. The consolidated data foundation positions firms for a future in which alternative assets like private markets will be treated as boring as bonds in terms of reporting and compliance. With co-investment deals becoming more prevalent, GPs compete better for co-investment allocations by having a modern data foundation, so LPs have confidence in the GP’s capability to keep them informed of their positions, exposures, and performance. Further, a superior tech stack strengthens their profile in the eyes of the middlemen consultants who act as gatekeepers, advising LPs on which funds are operationally buttoned up and possess the appropriate return profiles.
Better reporting, faster closes, and stronger investor retention
A consolidated data foundation layer is one of the more powerful and impactful technologies in investment management today. It solves the problem of operational systems fragmentation, so a firm doesn’t need to rip out 5 or 10 SaaS solutions in favor of an end-to-end operational platform. Additionally, when GPs are ready to manage more funds, with more LPs, they are able to scale without taking on many more salaries. When they are ready to expand private credit strategies of complex structures and vehicles, they can keep up with the data demands. From dynamic LP reporting and multi-admin reconciliation to cross-fund analytics and on-demand performance insights, data consolidation enhances the GP-LP relationship. The result: better reporting, faster closes, and stronger investor retention.
[i] Business Insider, April 14, 2026.
[iii] CFA Institute, September 18, 2025.
[iv] CSC Global, January 13, 2026.
Cesar is responsible for Arcesium’s data management and investment operations technology and services offered to private markets fund managers and investors. Previously, he served as Senior Managing Director and Alternatives Business Head for North America at State Street — a role in which he drove the growth agenda for a business with approximately $1 trillion in Assets Under Administration by leading new product launches, expansion into new client segments, strategic partnerships, and acquisitions. He served on the board of State Street Fund Services Inc. Prior to that, as a Managing Director at J.P. Morgan, Cesar led the Private Equity & Real Estate Funds Services business from launch to $350Bn AUA. While at J.P. Morgan, he also held investment banking roles in New York, London, and Hong Kong. Cesar has a BS in Chemical Engineering from ITESM and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
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