The systems that anchor most institutional investment operations were designed for portfolios dominated by liquid, publicly traded securities. Daily pricing feeds, standard custodian formats, reporting cycles aligned with market closes: these were the inputs the infrastructure was built to process. They remain what most systems do well.
Private assets operate on entirely different terms. Valuations arrive quarterly, often with a one- to two-quarter lag. Capital calls and distributions follow irregular schedules. Data arrives from dozens of general partners in formats that rarely align with each other or with the formats used by public market custodians. The fragmentation is persistent enough that in 2026, Mercer, S&P Global, and Cambridge Associates jointly launched a standardization initiative specifically to address it, describing the challenge as delayed, incomplete, and inconsistent data that leaves investors making decisions with only a partial understanding of portfolio risk and liquidity.
Most institutions have addressed this gap incrementally: adding spreadsheet workflows alongside legacy systems, building manual reconciliation processes to bridge data sources, or relying on the investment team's institutional knowledge to fill gaps that systems cannot. These workarounds function. They do not scale, and they do not reduce the operational burden on lean investment teams.
Quarterly reporting for a diversified institutional portfolio means gathering data from multiple custodians in different formats, waiting for GP reports that typically arrive six to eight weeks after quarter-end, manually extracting and reconciling that data against internal models, and analyzing public and private holdings in separate environments because the risk tools built for one were not designed to accommodate the other. The board presentation that results is a snapshot assembled from sources with misaligned valuation dates.
That is an operational problem. It is also a fiduciary one. When the infrastructure cannot produce a coherent total portfolio view, investment committees and boards are reviewing allocation decisions based on data that is structurally two quarters stale. For a lean team, the quarter is spent assembling the picture rather than analyzing it.
This is not a niche problem. The 2025 NACUBO-Commonfund Study represents 657 institutions managing $944 billion in total assets. Among those institutions, more than half of assets are allocated to strategies that arrive with delayed, unstructured, and fragmented data.
The instinct in many organizations is to respond to this burden by adding resources: another analyst, a data operations hire, a consultant brought in at quarter-end. The underlying premise is that it is a capacity problem.
The institutions that have made the most progress have arrived at a different diagnosis. The gap is an infrastructure problem. The solution is a platform designed for the portfolio institutional investors are managing today, not more people working around one designed for a different era.
That means visibility across valuation cycles, not only at quarter-end. A risk framework that spans asset classes rather than analyzing public and private allocations separately. Reporting workflows a lean team can maintain without manual data assembly. And the ability to model scenarios, track pacing, and monitor commitments across strategies that evolve on timelines ranging from daily to annual. These requirements are not addressed by adding headcount to a workflow built around legacy infrastructure.
Institutions making progress on this problem share a common starting point: a clear assessment of where current infrastructure falls short, and a willingness to treat the gap as a structural issue rather than a process improvement opportunity.
In practice, this means platforms that deliver a unified view across public and private holdings, with data integration designed to normalize inputs from custodians, fund administrators, and GP reports. It means a consistent analytical framework across the full portfolio, with factor-based risk coverage that includes private market allocations. It means reporting workflows that compress the quarterly cycle from weeks to days, with output structured for investment committee and board audiences.
Solovis is a multi-asset portfolio management and analytics platform built for institutional investors navigating this operating environment, delivering a unified view across public and private markets. The Venn analytics layer, powered by the Two Sigma Factor Lens, applies factor-based risk analysis across the full portfolio, including private market allocations adjusted for the valuation smoothing effects inherent in quarterly reporting cycles. For institutions carrying more than half of their assets in private and alternative strategies, that cross-asset coverage is the analytical baseline, not a feature add-on.
Private market allocations are not pulling back. According to Mercer's 2025 Endowments and Foundations Investment Survey, 32% of endowments and foundations have already added or expanded private markets exposure, with allocations to private equity and private debt expected to see the largest net increases over the next three years. The operational requirements that come with those allocations will continue to grow.
The question is direct: does the platform the organization relies on today reflect the portfolio it is actually managing? If the answer involves manual reconciliation, siloed risk analysis, and quarter-end data assembly, the infrastructure has not kept pace.
Want to see what a unified view of your portfolio actually looks like in practice? Talk to a Solovis expert.
Sources
2025 NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments (NCSE). Data as of fiscal year ending June 30, 2025. Reported via PNC Institutional Asset Management, April 2026.
Harvard University. Annual Financial Report, Fiscal Year 2025. Harvard Management Company.
Mercer, S&P Global, Cambridge Associates. Private Markets Performance Analytics Datasets. Press release, March 31, 2026. prnewswire.com.
Mercer. Endowments and Foundations Investment Survey 2025. mercer.com.