Bringing world-class private markets data to your fingertips 

As institutional capital flows into private markets, the infrastructure behind investment decisions has not kept pace. The challenge is not just access to opportunity, but access to reliable, high-quality data. Unlike public markets, where performance benchmarking, risk modeling, and exposure comparisons are standardized, private markets are still grappling with fragmented, inconsistent datasets.

Key challenges include:

  • Insufficient data sources - Most data are still pulled from public filings, creating long delays and an incomplete picture of performance.
  • Lack of quality at scale - Many vendors prioritize volume over validity, including lower-quality funds to boost sample sizes, resulting in datasets riddled with gaps.
  • Shallow transparency - Data rarely goes beyond the fund level. Information on underlying assets, portfolio companies, or deal-level metrics is often unavailable or unreliable.
  • No investor-driven standards - The lack of shared taxonomies and data standards makes it difficult to compare across managers or asset classes, and nearly impossible to unify public and private reporting.

A GP-data led approach

One potential solution to this challenge is cross-industry collaboration. This concept has driven our recently announced collaborations with S&P and Cambridge Associates. It represents a significant step forward in making General Partner (GP) data more accessible and actionable, potentially offering enhanced insights across private markets.

By leveraging Mercer’s strategic investment experience, S&P’s powerful analytics, and Cambridge Associates’ industry knowledge, this collaboration aims to establish a comprehensive framework designed to unlock valuable data and provide more transparent views of the private market landscape making it more accessible to a large investor base.

One of the key aspects of this collaboration is its “industry-by-industry” approach, which will collate anonymized data from GPs directly, creating a more robust and accurate picture of market conditions. By improving the accuracy and timeliness of private market data, the collaboration provides deeper insights into market performance, underlying risks, trends, and investor behavior. This enables better-informed decision-making, facilitating more precise allocations and strategic planning across private markets.

Moreover, the collaboration fosters greater transparency, enhancing the sharing of insights and analysis among industry players. This exchange of information not only enriches the understanding of current market dynamics but also helps identify emerging opportunities and potential risks. Through this integrated, data-driven approach, Mercer, S&P, and Cambridge Associates1 are collectively striving to advance private market analysis, which can result in positioning investors to navigate these markets with greater confidence and precision. Ultimately, this collaboration represents a powerful step toward empowering investors with the tools and insights needed to thrive in today’s complex financial environment.