In March last year, BlackRock closed its $3.2 billion acquisition of Preqin. It established the world’s biggest investment manager as a premier provider of private-markets data, “accelerating clients’ ability to allocate to the growth of private markets and furthering our aspirations to deliver greater value across their whole portfolios,” said chief operating officer Rob Goldstein.
Exactly 11 months later it was announced that Preqin was integrated into BlackRock Aladdin’s eFront, giving institutional investors “comprehensive research, due diligence and portfolio monitoring tools” on that single platform. “For the first time, clients can bring pre-investment intelligence and post-investment analytics together in a single, integrated workflow, narrowing the gap between how institutional investors manage assets across private and public portfolios,” said Sloane Collins, head of product for Aladdin Private Markets.
The BlackRock-Preqin tie-up may be “redefining the standard for private markets technology and data,” in Collins’ words. But it does not have the field to itself. The burgeoning sector is ripe for competition and innovation even in a more difficult cycle for credit and other products.
S&P Global last November paid $1.8 billion for With Intelligence, bringing “deep expertise in alternative investments complement[ing] our existing capabilities,” said S&P president and CEO Martina Cheung. The acquisition “represents a significant step forward in our strategy to provide essential intelligence for our customers as they navigate complexity in the rapidly expanding private markets landscape.”
That S&P deal came on the heels of a strategic collaboration with Cambridge Associates and Mercer “to deliver comprehensive private markets performance analytics.”
Saugata Saha, S&P Global
“The private markets industry has experienced tremendous growth, but data fragmentation has made it challenging for investors to get a clear picture of performance," said Saugata Saha, president of S&P Global Market Intelligence and chief enterprise data officer of S&P Global. “By combining S&P Global’s trusted data and solutions with the research expertise of Mercer and Cambridge Associates, we aim to transform how private markets intelligence is created, shared and utilized, empowering critical investment decisions.”
“The direction of travel is clear. Private markets are becoming data-driven and increasingly automated,” said Patrick O'Meara, chairman and CEO of Inveniam, which provides decentralized data infrastructure for private market assets. “We are scaling our senior leadership team to meet that shift,” he added in announcing the appointment of Rakesh Parameshwar, formerly of Bloomberg, Moody’s Analytics and several Wall Street banks, as managing director, solution architect.
"Private credit teams need infrastructure that can operate at the speed and scale of the market,” said Gareth Evans, chief product officer at Finbourne Technology, which in November expanded a fixed-income data and analytics partnership with London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) and in February hooked up with AI-driven allocators platform Alkymi on an integrated credit risk monitoring solution for the private credit industry.
“By combining Alkymi’s document intelligence with Finbourne’s unified data platform,” Evans added, “we're giving credit professionals the real-time visibility and operational control they need, with the data quality, lineage, and auditability that modern risk management demands.”
Alkymi CEO Harald Collet commented, "Private credit is increasingly complex and document-intensive, placing significant pressure on operational and risk oversight functions. Working with Finbourne combines “best-in-class data management with AI-driven automation to give investment managers faster, more reliable insight into their portfolios while strengthening governance and control."
LSEG, meanwhile, has partnered with BlackRock-Preqin and is licensing Nasdaq eVestment private-market datasets to be “integrated into LSEG’s ecosystem, expanding transparency and decision-making capabilities across the private investment landscape.”
Intercontinental Exchange recently launched ICE Private Credit Intelligence, with Apollo Global Management in the supporting role of anchor partner. ICE made the point that “as the market grows and public and private markets converge, the data infrastructure supporting the asset class has not kept pace, creating a need for greater transparency, standardized data and clearer information for investors.”
Chris Edmonds, Intercontinental Exchange
“As private credit continues to scale, the next phase of the market’s evolution will require stronger infrastructure and more standardized data that enables market participants to own and transact in private credit in a way that mirrors the public credit experience,” stated Apollo partner Eric Needleman, head of Apollo Capital Solutions.
Chris Edmonds, president of ICE Fixed Income and Data Services, placed it within the company’s tradition of “using sophisticated technology to modernize markets and offer innovative new services to our customers that help manage risk and support their alpha generation initiatives. By bringing our vast data science expertise, and working with a leading firm like Apollo, we’re excited to launch a new service that will solve crucial challenges in the private credit market and ultimately offer new opportunities to our customers.”
Apollo, Franklin Templeton, KKR and Morgan Stanley were the first disclosed clients of Corastone when “the hyperscaler for private market investing” announced the launch of its permissioned blockchain infrastructure in November.
“Innovations in product structure are making high-quality private markets investments more accessible, but complex operational processes continue to create barriers to entry, ultimately impacting the investor experience,” said Doug Krupa, KKR’s head of Global Wealth Solutions in the Americas. “We are pleased to collaborate with this group of industry leaders to support Corastone’s growth in unlocking greater participation in the private market ecosystem.”
Despite the momentum, the private markets still have a ways to go to match public-market ecosystems.
Talia Klein, DTCC
Talia Klein of post-trade market infrastructure giant Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. pointed out in a podcast that “public markets became seamless because the industry hit a breaking point and had no choice but to build shared infrastructure.” Private markets have “friction points” that need to be similarly resolved, but to stay true to the appeal of private assets, it’s not a simple task of “copy-pasting public market workflows” onto them.
At the scale of DTCC’s operations, “reliability isn’t a feature, it’s the floor. That same discipline is what private markets need as they move into the mainstream,” said Klein, who is managing director and head of Wealth & Investment Solutions.
Stewart Watterson, a Datos Inights strategic advisor, noted that private markets lack standard identifiers, real-time pricing, disclosure frameworks, centralized clearing and other elements.
Audrey Costabile, senior market structure and technology analyst, Crisil Coalition Greenwich, said that better data and technology have become critical to private-market participants, supporting value-added activities such as new-client initiation, enhancing client portals and other communications, and interacting with fund administrators and prime brokers.
“The goal is to reduce analysts’ time when sourcing and trying to manipulate data so instead they can focus on value creation,” Costabile said.
Audrey Costabile, Coalition Greenwich
Such technologies as artificial intelligence and machine learning are only as beneficial as the quality of data inputs. In a Coalition Greenwich survey of private equity, credit, and venture capital professionals, only 8% believed their firms have a high degree of data maturity; 61% viewed their data as moderately organized across systems; and 27% considered data integration and standardization as limited.
The firm said 2025 was a “pivotal year of change” for private capital, driven by intensifying competition for capital, more participation from retail investors, rising limited-partner expectations, and accelerating technological change. Challenges that private market participants face include low organizational readiness for AI, fragmented data and technology environments, and the persistence of manual, spreadsheet-based workflows.
“High performers are characterized as having a clear link between investment and technology, and are successfully organizing data and leveraging advanced technology,” according to the report.
Short of literally replicating public-market infrastructure, firms can turn to artificial intelligence and blockchain.
Alkymi says that its “hardened private cloud environment” on Amazon Web Services integrates “large language models (LLMs) and AI agents into private-markets workflows, supported by governance controls at the application, model and network levels.”
“Despite the rise of AI technology, many clients are still searching for turnkey solutions that remove complexity from private market operations,” said Hugues Chabanis, head of SimCorp Alternatives. As of January, buy-side users of the SimCorp One investment management platform gained direct access to MSCI’s private market data service and datasets, building on a strategic partnership that started in 2022 with private-investment benchmark data.
Stewart Watterson, Datos Insights
“By embedding MSCI data, indexes and analytics into SimCorp One, we are equipping investors with powerful tools to better manage complexity, address regulatory demands, and drive better outcomes,” said Luke Flemmer, MSCI head of private assets.
With its acquisition of PM Insights, announced on April 7, MSCI is “bringing objective secondary market pricing, liquidity and reference data to our clients to support more robust portfolio construction and the development of indexes and analytics solutions,” Flemmer said.
Datos’ Watterson said a primary use case of blockchain is for “metadata” to link tokens to the actual data and enable it to be categorized and structured.
Smart contracts can automate interest payments, covenant enforcement, investor eligibility and other functions that private companies struggle with when first crossing into public markets. “Now they’re having to open the kimono,” Watterson remarked. “It’s setting up governance, policies, regulations, and getting data organized in a way that can be reported to investors.”
He sees the entry of startups into private-market infrastructure as a “miniboom” that is likely to subside near-term. “Some of them provide competitive advantages, but it won’t last very long because the big financial companies have the resources to either build it or buy it, and they will want to do that very quickly.”