The Investor-Driven Data Battle: How GPs Are Upping Their Game

Introduction

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In conversations with private market managers across the US and beyond, a clear pattern has emerged: data is no longer a back-office concern. It’s become a board-level priority – and a critical differentiator in an increasingly unforgiving fundraising environment. Investors are asking tougher questions, expecting faster answers, and rewarding firms that can deliver transparency and confidence alongside returns. Yet many managers remain constrained by legacy processes and fragmented systems that simply can’t keep up.

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This paper explores why the data challenge is coming to a head, how the industry’s starting to respond, and what forward-thinking firms are doing to turn data from a liability into a strategic asset.

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In today’s hyper-competitive fundraising environment, private market managers can no longer rely on a strong track record. Investors care about performance – of course – but alongside returns they’re expecting a seamless, high-touch user experience. More specifically, they’re after real-time, accurate and digital reporting from their managers.

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But there’s a problem. Most private equity, credit, and real asset managers just don’t have the data infrastructure or tech to meet these needs. If firms are to future-proof their businesses and beat the competition, they need to up their data game.

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The Days of Easy Money are Over

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After a solid bull run, the tide’s now turning against private markets.

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Inflation and interest rates are up, and with it, so too is the cost of financing. Although private equity’s proven resilient, managers are feeling the squeeze. There’s a growing pressure to deliver exits, distribute funds and source new capital, particularly amidst the prevailing uncertainty.

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Fundraising is tougher than ever, too. According to Bain & Co, private market fundraising narrowly avoided suffering a sixth consecutive quarter of decline. Meanwhile, 18,000 funds are currently vying for $3.3 trillion of investor commitments – so for every $3 of demand, there’s just $1 of supply.

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Iain Robertson, Head of Client Success, Lantern, said this fundraising inertia is being further compounded by institutions looking for safety in size when making capital allocations. “Similar to what we have seen in public markets, investors are making bigger ticket allocations, but to fewer, larger managers. Firms are under no illusion that they’re operating in an incredibly competitive market,” he continued.

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And institutional investors are playing it safe, concentrating their allocations with the biggest players. McKinsey found that the top 25 fundraisers took in 41% of total commitments – with the top five alone capturing nearly half of that. Smaller and newer funds? They’re closing fewer deals than at any point in over a decade.

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Why Data is the Battleground

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If you want to stand out in this hyper-competitive environment, you can’t just deliver returns. You must deliver an exceptional investor experience, too.

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“Performance isn’t the only thing investors are looking at anymore”, says Tony Poulson, Lantern’s Chief Revenue Officer.  “What really differentiates managers is the experience they deliver – the responsiveness, transparency, and confidence they inspire in their investors. And that all comes back to technology and data.

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Here’s the reality, though – most managers are at a data crossroads. And many are stuck in the wrong lane.

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The Data Achilles’ Heel

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For too many firms, data remains a liability rather than an asset. Managers’ data is often siloed across teams, trapped in spreadsheets, or scattered among multiple asset servicers. Speaking to a range of firms, from VC’s to global managers, here’s what we’re seeing on the ground:

• Siloed data: Different teams maintain their own versions of the truth – finance, operations and IR often work from separate spreadsheets, with no way to reconcile quickly or confidently.
• A patchwork of asset servicer systems: Most managers juggle data feeds from multiple asset servicers, each with their own accounting systems, document portals and ‘quirks’ (for want of a better word…). None are really designed to serve the GP or LP experience. Often, even simple metrics like NAV or investor positions differ between servicers, leaving the GP stuck to normalise and reconcile the data themselves.
• Outdated tools and manual workarounds: Too often, critical investor data still lives in emailed PDFs, hard-coded spreadsheets, and aging legacy systems. The result’s a convoluted process, prone to errors and painfully slow.
• No single source of truth: “During one, albeit rather extreme, fundraising example, the manager, asset servicer and the placement agent all had different data points for the same data item, and nobody knew which one of them was right,” he said. Very few managers have a trusted, firm-wide single source of truth, and when discrepancies emerge, credibility and trust with LPs evaporate fast.

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“When the same data point lives in several different places and no two numbers match,” Iain explains, “even answering a basic investor question or producing an accurate report becomes a nightmare. A typical private market manager might use 3-4 asset servicers too, each using their own accounting system or document portal, which fulfil the needs of the asset servicers, not the asset managers or owners.

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Bad data doesn’t just slow managers down. It exposes them to operational risks, compliance issues, and reputational damage. It also burns resources. Many firms resort to shadow accounting teams to reconcile inconsistent data, but that’s often expensive, error-prone, and unsustainable – especially as margins tighten, pressure mounts and firms scale.

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And it’s not just about costs. “Manual, frustrating data processes drive away top talent,” says Iain. “People don’t want to spend their days cleaning up spreadsheets or defending numbers under pressure.”

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Turning the Corner

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The good news? The industry’s rising to the challenge and progress is being made.

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In just the past few years, there’s been a surge of innovation at the intersection of private markets, data, and tech. Advances in cloud infrastructure, machine learning, natural language processing, and data integration tools are making it far more realistic to clean, connect, and validate complex datasets at scale.

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We’re seeing more managers – and their asset servicers – acknowledge that legacy processes and fragmented systems are no longer viable. Forward-thinking firms are actively investing in new solutions to:

• Automate the ingestion and reconciliation of administrator data
• Standardise and enrich unstructured documents like PDFs and statements
• Implement API-driven platforms to deliver real-time insights to internal teams and LPs
• Embed anomaly detection and validation logic to catch errors before they flow downstream

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Crucially, it’s not just about the technology itself – but also about applying domain expertise to design processes that work in the nuanced world of private markets.

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“We’re at an inflection point,” says Tony. “For the first time, managers can realistically expect to build a single source of truth for their data – without having to manually aggregate, normalise and validate it themselves. They’re able to deliver a level of transparency and responsiveness that investors now demand.”

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Where Lantern’s Disrupting

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At Lantern, we’re proud to be part of this broader movement – helping managers connect, cleanse, and validate data from across asset servicers and internal systems, and making it actionable.

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By carefully blending technology with private markets expertise, we create a trusted, unified dataset – accessible through our platform or delivered directly into their internal models, tools, and portals via APIs.

“We’ve helped managers move beyond spreadsheets and shadow accounting teams to regain confidence in their numbers, meet deadlines, and deliver a superior investor experience” says Iain.

One $40B private equity manager, for example, struggled to reconcile conflicting data from four administrators, forcing them to build an expensive, manual shadow accounting operation – and still miss reporting deadlines. Lantern helped them ingest, validate, and standardize all asset servicer feeds, automatically flagging anomalies and making clean, trusted data available in real time for reporting and dashboards.

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Learn how one firm reduced fund reporting time by 80%

‍Read more

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The Path Forward – Why the Time to Act is Now

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The era of easy money is over, and the bar for investor experience has never been higher. Managers who ignore the data challenge risk falling behind, burdened by inefficiency, errors, and lost credibility. But those who act now can gain a clear edge by delivering the transparency, responsiveness, and trust that today’s investors demand.

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Fixing your data isn’t just about compliance or cost savings. It’s about positioning your firm to win – in this cycle and the next. The tools and expertise are out there. The question’s no longer if you should address the problem – but how soon. If you’d like to see how Lantern can up your data game, and provide a seamless GP and LP experience, then get it touch – we’d love to show you the platform in action.