📝 The AGM Op-Ed: Rethinking Reporting as a Competitive Advantage
Views from the field with Arcesium's Senior Vice President, Business Development - Private Markets Jean Robert
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 perspectives below from Arcesium Senior Vice President, Business Development - Private Markets Jean Robert.
Rethinking Reporting as a Competitive Advantage
By Jean Robert, Senior Vice President, Business Development - Private Markets, Arcesium
Reporting has traditionally been treated as a reactive task in the private markets. A box to check for compliance; a response to investor demands; or a quarterly scramble to produce Excel files.
Today, the most competitive firms are turning reporting into something far more powerful: a strategic asset for investor engagement, fundraising, and operational insight.
In a landscape where investor expectations are rising and fundraising timelines are tightening, reporting isn’t just about ticking a box. It’s about delivering clarity, trust, and timely information. It’s about saying, “Your data, your way.”
From obligation to differentiator
Investors are no longer content with delayed, static reports. Many are consolidating their GP relationships, and prioritizing managers who can deliver timely, transparent, and accessible data.
Industry efforts like ILPA’s updated reporting standards and ESG data convergence initiative reflect growing pressure for standardization and efficiency. But progress has been slow.
Forward-thinking firms aren’t waiting around. They’re taking control of their data and rethinking how they deliver insights to LPs, regulators, and internal stakeholders.
For these firms, reporting is a tool to strengthen investor trust, reduce friction in the next fundraise, and create a more agile, data-driven culture.
Why Private Markets reporting is broken
Despite their size and sophistication, many private firms still rely on fragmented, Excel-based reporting processes. Outputs copied, pasted, and patched together across systems that don’t communicate with each other can lead to critical issues:
Inaccurate or stale data that needs manual verification.
Duplicated efforts across finance, ops, and IR teams.
A lack of trust in the numbers reported.
Inconsistent formatting and delays that frustrate LPs.
Dependence on fund admins or engineering teams to deliver custom reports.
As a result, reporting becomes a drag on productivity, an IR bottleneck, and a reputation risk. And when internal systems are too complex or slow, your business users are tempted to revert to Excel, abandoning the very platforms meant to support them.
Empowering your business, not just the back office
Clean, accurate data is the foundation of effective reporting, especially when investment structures are complex and transparency is critical.
To make the data even more effective, self-service tools that let users connect APIs, run their own calculations, or configure custom dashboards empower teams to generate insights without waiting on technical teams.
With streamlined data, business users can:
Explore cross-entity and multi-structure data.
Configure and reuse reporting templates across funds and timelines.
Deliver investor-ready reports in custom formats.
Access governed data.
What will separate leaders from laggards?
Tech-forward private credit firms are not just focused on fundraising and deploying capital — they’re also investing in the data infrastructure to support it all.
For private credit, bespoke structures like asset-based finance and specialty lending demand granular, loan-level tracking for everything from payment schedules and covenants to borrower performance. But managing a complex fund structure often means splitting systems between loan management and other asset classes; then stitching together outputs for accounting, reporting, and investor communications. By centralizing data into a synchronized source of truth, firms reduce operational friction, accelerate reporting cycles, and respond to LP and regulatory requests with greater accuracy and confidence.
The same challenge applies to infrastructure investors, where long investment horizons and complex, capital-intensive assets demand visibility into a wide range of metrics, from energy production and uptime to ESG impact and regulatory compliance. Unifying data across asset managers, operators, and finance teams helps streamline a historically manual, resource-heavy reporting process and frees teams to focus on strategic analysis instead of data wrangling.
Firms best positioned for the future are those that provide stakeholders with clean data, easy-to-use tools, and the freedom to run and build on small experiments. For instance, an investor portal can give LPs direct access to download notices or query data points or static charts. With the right tools, GPs gain the ability to distribute board-level management dashboards directly to leadership inboxes.
Your data. Your way.
As LPs sharpen their expectations, the firms that thrive will be the ones that take reporting seriously as a technical challenge and as a business differentiator.
That means being proactive about data governance, flexible in delivery, and fast in execution. It means removing friction between business and data teams. And it means treating reporting as a front-office function — because that’s where its impact is felt.
Firms that stick with static, delayed, or one-size-fits-all reporting risk falling behind and losing credibility with the very investors they’re trying to impress.
Reporting doesn’t have to be reactive, rigid, or resource intensive. Whether you’re preparing for a capital call, responding to a regulator, or tailoring performance insights for an LP, you can deliver answers on your terms with speed, accuracy, and confidence.
In private markets, reporting is no longer just a requirement — it’s a competitive advantage.
Jean is responsible for sales activities for Arcesium's technology and services in the private markets sector. Before Arcesium, he helped start, grow, and sell two firms that serviced the front, middle, and back office of high-yield corporate bonds, syndicated loans, and private credit managers and originators: Advantage Data and Best Credit Data. Both were sold to Solve Advisors, a portfolio company of Charlesbank, in 2022. Before the launch of Advantage Data and Best Credit, Jean worked at the predecessor banks of Bank of America and Sumitomo Bank, originating and syndicating middlemarket and large corporate credit. He holds a BS from Babson College and an MBA from the Olin School of Business.
Alt Goes Mainstream’s work is provided for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should always do your own research and consult advisors on these subjects. Alt Goes Mainstream’s work may feature entities in which Broadhaven Ventures or the author has invested in.
Lots of work to be done on digitizing private markets not least on reporting, which for many LPs remain a pain. This increases as LPs have their own specific concerns and peeves and need to report in greater detail to various regulators.