Private credit is the fastest-growing asset class in institutional finance. Yet the infrastructure built to monitor it has not kept pace.
Too often, LPs are still reconciling loan agency notices, compliance certificates and financial statements by hand, out of spreadsheets held together by Excel formulas nobody currently employed can even explain.
I sat down with Harald Collet, Founder and CEO of Alkymi, to chat about this exact problem.
He spent two decades working on the same underlying problem: unstructured data at Oracle, Autonomy and Bloomberg, where he built Bloomberg Vault from scratch and grew it to roughly a thousand firms in five years.
His bet is that private markets data will never standardize quite the way public markets did.
So he built Alkymi to absorb the mess rather than wait for the industry to clean it up - a system designed, in his words, to “embrace the randomness.”
The clients putting that bet to work are sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies and pension funds, collectively over $20 trillion in AUM.
In private credit, a single loan can require hundreds of data points a month. A fund needs 25 to 30, and none of it arrives in a common format. Getting on top of it means seeing data 45 to 60 days before it would otherwise reach the CIO.
A few of the things we get into:
Why private credit requires hundreds of data points per loan and why that number will never standardize
What it actually takes to move a monitoring workflow off spreadsheets and into production
Why every effort at common data formats in private markets hits the same wall
The Forward Deployed Engineer model for getting firms through the change management they can't staff themselves
Why Excel isn't going away and why it was never supposed to be the reporting platform
"These were young hopeful professionals that were sold on the dream of joining a glamorous firm, and they were essentially processing PDFs in the shared email inboxes for the first 18 months of their time at the firm... And we thought, this is a terrible way to work."
Private credit needs real data infrastructure. The asset class is only growing and the mess is only getting bigger.
The firms still waiting for a standard are running out of time.
The senior technology and operations leaders grappling with problems like these will be in Toronto on October 6 for The 2026 LP Tech Summit. A full day built to accelerate an integrated operating system for private markets.