Chris Sparenberg: The Raw Materials of Private Markets

S&P Global built the information layer for public markets. Private markets is next.In 1860, Henry Varnum Poor published a manual on American railroads to inform investors. That business became Standard and Poor’s.The mission then was the same as it is now: build the information infrastructure for a market that is scaling faster than anyone can track.Private markets is the current assignment.The problem: a market that cannot measure itself. Performance data arrives in PDFs. Every manager reports differently. There is no agreed taxonomy, no standard for comparison. More data is flowing through private markets than ever before... and almost none of it is comparable.Chris Sparenberg started his career at Cambridge Associates building private markets benchmarks from the ground up. He’s now Head of Private Markets Strategy and GTM at S&P Global Market Intelligence - and he’s spent his entire career in private markets data, technology and analytics.In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Chris and Marc cover:The work S&P Global has done with Cambridge Associates and Mercer to create a new taxonomy and performance analytics for private marketsWhy more data is creating more complexity, not lessThe GP/LP disclosure challenge and how it's quietly resolvingThe role played by iLEVEL as a data clearinghouse, which allows GPs to report to their LPs on a one-to-many basisWhy we're in the second inning (and what separates the firms already building from the ones just arriving)"We want to be in the raw materials business. We want to collect data at the atomic level, enrich it, make it useful to our clients, but also really give them the tools to use it as they need to."