BLOG — Nov 24, 2024

A Pivotal Year for Private Markets—And for iLEVEL

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Head of iLEVEL Product, Dan Gorlick

This has been an eventful year for the private markets, one that posed new challenges and opened new doors. Many firms grew exponentially. The boom in private credit continued. Private equity navigated significant illiquidity. And AI began impacting operations at every stage of the investment lifecycle.

Market trends like these guide the product roadmap for our iLEVEL middle-office solution and spur innovation, which is why 2024 also saw the delivery of a host of major new features and functionality focused on meeting the evolving needs of our private markets clients.

Building a client-driven product roadmap

The size and diversity of our iLEVEL client base (including more than 700 asset managers and allocators) gives us great insight into the top industry challenges. By examining client success stories, talking to power users and analyzing platform usage, we prioritize and roadmap the ideas that will address the market's biggest challenges and deliver the greatest value to users.

In 2024, this approach has yielded an array of innovations that are helping allocators and managers use data to uncover new insights based on the past, present and future performance of their portfolios.

Innovations in data ingestion

We know that powering iLEVEL’s visualization and analytics capabilities begins with data. This is why we dedicated much of 2024 to advancing the build of our revolutionary new approach to data collection within iLEVEL, which will bring our new AI-driven data ingestion tooling side by side with iLEVEL’s existing template collection framework. Actively in Beta and set to officially launch in January, this new combination of AI-powered collection, alongside iLEVEL’s existing and robust template framework, will give our community the tools required to capture data at scale.

Innovations in private credit

In line with the asset class’s continued growth within our client community, private credit remains a key area of focus. This year we completed an end-to-end integration between iLEVEL and our WSO loan portfolio software, ensuring the seamless inclusion of credit-specific data into the broader portfolio monitoring experience. In addition, we have advanced our ability to help clients visualize the full capitalization structure of their borrowers, with a Beta actively deployed and full launch planned for Q1 of 2025.

Innovations in data management

Data aggregation and normalization enable our clients to utilize data fully within the iLEVEL platform, but we know our clients need to seamlessly flow that data into their broader technology stack. In 2024, we launched a new SFTP integration and a host of API enhancements to make it even easier to access that data across an organization's digital tools and platforms.

Innovations in insight generation

As asset managers are holding onto assets longer and managing them more closely than ever before, the ability to generate insights from portfolio data is becoming essential. This year we added multiple data visualization enhancements to unlock new ways of interrogating and analyzing the portfolio—both on-platform and via no-code integrations with Power BI and other industry-leading data visualization tools.

We also enhanced iLEVEL’s analytic capabilities through the addition of commitment pacing, which enables fund investors use the Takahashi Alexander model to manage and monitor fund commitments in iLEVEL (learn more here).

Innovations in user experience

As portfolio management software supports a wider range of tasks and yields a broader range of high-quality insights, more roles within the financial organization need to be able to access them directly. We see many of our clients transitioning away from the "gatekeeper" model (one or two users fulfilling data requests) to a "self-service" model, in which individuals across the business access iLEVEL data directly.

To support this trend, we have enhanced permissioning and the overall user experience. This includes the launch of the activity log for platform administrator; revamping how our users view cash transactions; and even something as simple as making it easier to troubleshoot an error message.

A new approach to valuations

We are seeing a big shift in the industry’s approach to valuations. Handing valuations off to a credible auditor is no longer enough. Many firms now want to leverage their own internal models and methodologies, communicate their own POV and rationalize deviations from the auditor’s underlying assumptions and interpretations.

To support these nuanced conversations with investors, we are advancing the innovations required to help our clients run valuations on assets across their private book. The marquee development in iLEVEL valuation capabilities was the launch of iLEVEL Peer Comparables. Powered by S&P Capital IQ Pro, this powerful feature enables firms to gain insight into their portfolio's current and future performance by benchmarking private companies against their public market peers (read more about this here).

Other new features include:

● New ways to track valuation metrics on a security-by-security basis

● A refreshed experience for navigating iLEVEL cap tables

● Enhancements to the guideline public company method

● Detailed footnote disclosure reports for internal and audit reviews

2025: The future of portfolio monitoring and valuations

Building on this success and momentum, the 2025 roadmap is packed with ambitious enhancements, with AI enrichment, self-service and full-service valuations, and enhancements to private credit workflows topping the list.

AI takes center stage

Next year, the planned release of AI-powered data extraction will cover more document types at greater scale for portfolio monitoring. We will also roll out LLM-powered search to unlock easier access to the insights contained within the platform.

Integrations for private credit

We will continue to invest in private credit, including deepening the integration with WSO, extending our ability to analyze and visualize cap structures, leverage AI to scale the ingestion of compliance certificates and run advanced credit analytics to generate new insights.

Self- and full-service valuations

We are continuing to expand our valuation coverage beyond venture capital to include self-service valuation support for private equity and private credit. We also have plans to expand the newly launched peer comparables feature while bringing a direct integration from Cap IQ to facilitate public company pricing into the fold in 2025 as well.

Beyond what we’re doing in the software space, we are also bringing S&P Global’s full-service valuations offering directly into the iLEVEL experience through a turnkey integration, enabling our clients to connect our industry-leading valuation services directly into iLEVEL.

The future of portfolio management

Technology is a competitive differentiator for asset allocators and managers, enabling them to reduce costs, scale their operations, generate new insights and engage investors with greater credibility and sophistication.

By finding ever-better ways to turn data into insights that can be accessed and used across the organization, iLEVEL continues to give clients an advantage in a crowded market.

If you're a current iLEVEL client, please contact your client manager for a tour of the many new features available to you. If you're not yet an iLEVEL client, please request a demo here for a closer look at the platform.


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