I recently attended a fascinating briefing event held by Walkers Global in Dublin, where industry leaders unpacked one of the most important structural shifts in asset management today. Private markets are expanding at pace and they are bringing operational complexity with them. For firms servicing these structures, this is no longer an abstract trend. It is already shaping the day to day work of fund administrators, depositaries, investment managers and management companies across Ireland, Luxembourg and the UK.
Private credit, infrastructure, private equity and related hybrid structures continue to raise capital at record levels. Lower correlation to public markets, a more predictable yield profile and investor appetite for bespoke strategies have driven inflows. As regulatory wrappers evolve, structures like ILPs, ELTIFs and ICAVs are becoming increasingly common. More wrappers means more cash accounts, more counterparties and more reconciliation workflows. The operational impact is real.
These asset classes introduce multiple layers of operational friction. Bank and broker data formats are non standard, positions are illiquid, valuations can be manual, waterfall mechanics live in spreadsheets and transaction flows span several systems. Most firms still rely heavily on manual consolidation, reconciliation and exception reporting. It is slow and prone to operational risk.
As private assets scale, the operational tooling supporting them has not kept pace. That gap is widening.
If you are onboarding private asset funds without industrialising your middle and back office workflows, you are accepting unnecessary risk. Key challenges include, variable bank statement formats, capital call and distribution reconciliations, loan level asset reconciliation, interest and fee accrual checks, cash flow monitoring and investor level reporting.
All of these are high volume and exception based. They are also perfect candidates for automation.
Fund Recs has seen a notable rise in private asset clients bringing these challenges to our platform. They are not asking for generic tools. They are asking for configurable workflows that absorb messy data, automate manual friction and surface exceptions clearly. Our approach is simple, ingest any file format, normalise it, apply reconciliation rules and evidence exceptions in a clean workflow.
This unlocks several benefits, lower operational risk, faster period end closes, consistent oversight and audit ready evidence.
Depositaries and management companies are also tightening oversight obligations. They must demonstrate independent checks on administrator outputs, day on day NAV movements, capital activity and fee accruals. A spreadsheet will not stand up to a regulatory review when dealing with bespoke loan books.
An automated oversight layer removes that risk.
Everyone can issue capital calls. The competitive edge lies in operational scalability. If you can standardise reconciliations, document ingestion, exception evidence and oversight, you can safely service more private clients without adding headcount. Those who do not will choke on complexity.
The growth in private assets is not slowing. But the winners will be those who address the operational challenge early, treat middle office efficiency as a strategic capability and view automation as a prerequisite, not a luxury.
Fund Recs will continue to invest in solving these problems alongside our clients. If you are exploring how to scale private credit or infrastructure fund operations without adding operational drag, we would be happy to share what we are seeing across the industry.
If you are increasing exposure to private credit, infrastructure, real estate or NAV based lending, now is the moment to industrialise the operational layer. Waiting until complexity becomes unmanageable forces urgent remediation, hiring surges, operational risk incidents and difficult conversations with boards or regulators. Building scalable oversight and reconciliation capability while you still have capacity is strategic. Building it when you are already underwater is expensive.
If you would like to see how peers are approaching this, how they are standardising the messy middle and what good looks like, we would be happy to walk you through live examples. We can show you how teams are automating loan level reconciliations, evidencing NAV oversight, removing spreadsheet risk and presenting clean exception dashboards to boards, depositaries and regulators.
The fastest growth in our client base is coming from firms who started early and designed their oversight layer ahead of scale. The ones who win are already simplifying now.
If you want to explore this, get in touch. We can scope a short demonstration tailored to your asset mix, perform a sample reconciliation on your live data and share what others in your segment are doing across Europe and the US.