More investors demanding transparency from private markets: BlackRock’s Aladdin

[SINGAPORE] Investors today want to know what their money is going into – even within private market assets, said Tarek Chouman, global head of Aladdin Client Business at BlackRock.

“People are expecting to understand where their money is going, which company is being held by the fund, how the company is performing against the expectations of the general partner,” he added.

Aladdin is a technology platform built by BlackRock for portfolio management.

And not only do investors want to know exactly where their money is going, they also want the specifics of how a fund is performing. For instance, if a fund with a portfolio of companies manages to sell one of its companies for a windfall while the rest perform poorly, the outsized sale of that one company would skew the fund’s performance.

When the general partner (GP) of the fund looks to raise the next fund based on the previous fund’s performance, investors would not know the real reason for the outperformance without the specifics.

“If you know that the allocation of the performance was related to one company out of 40, you wouldn’t commit your money for the fund,” said Chouman.

With private markets forecast to grow to US$30 trillion globally by 2030, it is a significant asset class that asset managers are not ignoring.

Exposure to private markets vary by region and country, and Chouman estimates that institutional players in Japan have one of the lowest exposures at 5 per cent, with Singapore much higher, and Australia probably with the highest.

Aladdin is also trying to plug the gap in transparency and visibility in private markets with its March 2025 completion of the Preqin acquisition, a data platform for alternative and private market assets.

The acquisition was powered by the belief that private markets data will grow in value because of its current scarcity. Chouman said the move by private markets data towards transparency mirrors that of public markets data, paving the way towards convergence of the two segments in the coming years.

He said Aladdin has the most accurate post-investment data, as it has its clients’ consent to get it direct from their asset managers. In this same push for data becoming more accessible, Preqin offers pre-investment data, which it gets from media reports and calls through Aladdin’s direct connections with GPs.

“It is the most comprehensive that exists in the industry,” said Chouman.