Best private markets data provider—MSCI

Product overview—Private Capital Transparency

New York-based MSCI provides data, analytics, indexes and portfolio management solutions to help investors make the most judicious investment decisions. Across public and private markets, MSCI delivers research-driven data and analytics supporting a range of functions, including portfolio construction, risk management, performance measurement and transparency. Its Private Capital solutions include benchmarking, portfolio management, transparency data and private credit risk assessment to help investors gain greater insight into the private assets in which they invest.

Secret sauce

MSCI Private Capital Transparency combines standardized private asset data with analytics that connect private and public markets in a single investment view. By integrating manager-reported information with independent data and consistent methodologies, the service helps investors improve transparency, benchmark portfolios, strengthen risk oversight and make more informed investment decisions across their total portfolios.

Recent milestones

MSCI recently unveiled:

• Artificial intelligence-enabled data extraction, enabling the firm to gather more data at higher quality in a more timely manner.
• A data catalog extension to extend the MSCI data ontology across asset classes.
• A disclosure dashboard release to measure general partner data disclosures

Future objectives

MSCI will develop:

• An AI-enabled self-service experience for Transparency Data where clients want access to normalized data immediately.
• Continued data source expansion to include publicly available datasets.
• Disclosure benchmarks to measure relative disclosure quality at a fund level.

Why MSCI won

MSCI walks away from this year’s Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data awards with arguably the most topical—and consequently, one of the most competitive—of all 35 categories on offer: Best private markets data provider. It is no secret that private markets have become one of the most sought-after areas of focus for institutional investors because of the potential for higher returns and the opportunity to diversify portfolios and invest in firms they wouldn’t otherwise have access to. However, these investors have also been forced to reckon with a range of challenges stemming from limited liquidity, often opaque valuations, complex due diligence processes and an all-round lack of transparency. MSCI wins this category thanks to its outstanding Private Capital Transparency offering, designed to add standardized private assets data and analytics into a broader investment view spanning public and private markets.

The service combines manager-reported information with independent data and consistent methodologies, helping investors benchmark portfolios, strengthen risk oversight and understand their private market exposures in the context of the total portfolios. However, MSCI’s approach goes beyond simply collecting high‑quality information: its aim is to make disparate disclosures more comparable for investors, and therefore more useful when driving their all-important investment decisions. Recent developments from the firm reinforce that ambition, including AI-enabled extraction to gather data more quickly and at higher quality, an expanded data catalog extending its ontology across asset classes and a disclosure dashboard designed to measure general partner reporting.

Future Private Capital Transparency iterations will focus on providing clients with self-service access to normalized transparency data, expanding the range of publicly available sources, and introducing fund‑level benchmarks for disclosure quality, all of which are practical steps toward addressing private markets’ persistent pain points. By combining the reach of its data infrastructure with a more consistent framework for understanding private assets, MSCI is helping investors move closer to a single, usable view of their portfolios.