Benchmarks are evolving from performance scorecards into tools that support portfolio construction, governance, and decision-making, as private markets become a larger part of portfolios
Round-up of Preqin’s webinar, The New Era of Private Markets Benchmarks, moderated by Cameron Joyce, Director, Global Head of Preqin Private Markets Research, BlackRock. Panelists included Diego Alaimo, Head of Indirect Private Strategies/Multi-Asset, Generali Asset Management; Odi Lahav, Chief Operating Officer, Bfinance; and Fabien Chen, Managing Director, Head of Preqin Benchmarks, BlackRock.
Private markets have grown dramatically in both scale and strategic importance in recent years. Yet the frameworks investors use to evaluate performance haven’t always kept pace as allocations increase.
Today investors are asking more of their private markets benchmarks – not just to measure performance, but to support reporting, portfolio construction, manager evaluation, and investment decisions. ‘The days when we simply ranked managers by quartile and left it there are long gone,’ Cameron Joyce notes.
This shift comes at a particularly important moment for private markets. Following a decade of strong growth, investors are navigating a more challenging environment marked by higher interest rates, slower distributions, and greater performance scrutiny. At the same time, wealth investors are entering the market in greater numbers, bringing new expectations around transparency, comparability, and reporting.
Historically, benchmarking in private markets was largely focused on peer comparisons and manager rankings. Today, investors are using benchmarks in a much broader context. Investment committees, risk teams, and portfolio construction teams increasingly need frameworks that help them understand how private assets fit within a broader portfolio.
Diego Alaimo argues that benchmarks remain essential to investors, but only when viewed in the right context. ‘When I discuss an allocation in the investment committee, the manager’s quartile position is the starting point, not the end point. A benchmark tells us where we should look; then we need to understand what is actually driving performance.’
The implication is a significant one. Investors are increasingly looking beyond relative rankings and focusing instead on how benchmarking can support asset allocation, manager selection, and broader portfolio decisions.
While performance remains important, investor attention has increasingly shifted toward cash flow. With distributions remaining subdued across many private market strategies, allocators are paying closer attention to liquidity, capital recycling, and the ability of portfolios to generate realizations. For many investors, the challenge is ensuring capital is returned in a predictable way and can be redeployed into new opportunities.
‘Clearly, when we think about performance, the proportion of performance that is unrealized is increasing,’ Joyce says.
That perspective reflects a broader shift in priorities. Benchmarking is no longer solely about measuring returns; investors increasingly need frameworks that help them assess the relationship between reported performance, realized outcomes, and portfolio liquidity.
The current market backdrop reinforces that focus. While private markets have faced headwinds since the interest-rate hiking cycle began, periods of market dislocation have historically produced some of the strongest-performing vintages, underscoring the importance of maintaining a long-term perspective.
The users of benchmark data are no longer limited to private markets specialists. Risk teams, asset allocators, and portfolio managers increasingly want deeper visibility into the drivers of performance and risk across their portfolios.
Fabien Chen describes a market demanding greater precision and transparency. ‘The demands we hear from the market have increased exponentially over the past two or three years. People want look-through data, transaction-level data, and market data. They want a better understanding of private market risk and return.’
The growing demand for transparency reflects the increasingly strategic role private markets play within institutional portfolios. As Chen observes, ‘The types of clients I meet today are often not private markets teams. They’re asset allocation teams and risk management teams trying to understand private markets within the context of the whole portfolio.’
Investors are interested in understanding the underlying drivers of outcomes – whether that means asset-level exposures, portfolio construction decisions, or risk factors that cut across public and private markets.
The rise of evergreen and open-ended vehicles are broadening access to private markets, particularly among wealth investors. But they’re also introducing new questions around liquidity, performance measurement, and comparability.
Odi Lahav notes that greater accessibility can create its own challenges. ‘The risk is that investors see a wrapper that appears more liquid, while the underlying assets remain fundamentally less liquid.’
Benchmarking these structures requires different approaches from traditional drawdown funds. Investors need to account for differences in liquidity management, reporting frequency, and return measurement.
Alaimo highlights the trade-offs embedded within these vehicles. ‘If you compare an evergreen with a closed-end fund in the same asset class, the closed-end fund should have a higher return because the evergreen has a cash drag – it has to keep liquidity available to meet redemption options.’
As evergreen products continue to gain traction, clearer benchmarking frameworks will be essential if investors are to make meaningful comparisons across structures.
Looking ahead, the future of benchmarking lies in greater granularity, deeper attribution, and more sophisticated analytics. Investors increasingly want to understand not simply which managers outperformed, but how performance was generated in the first place.
For Alaimo, that means moving closer to the underlying assets. ‘What I would like the industry to move toward is deal-by-deal information at the asset level. Then you can begin to separate value created through positioning from value created through genuine sourcing and execution.’
Lahav points to a similar destination, describing a future where richer data and improved analytical tools allow investors to better understand the drivers of manager performance. ‘The holy grail is understanding attribution – working out how a manager actually generated performance based on the underlying constituent assets.’
Private markets remain relationship-driven and inherently nuanced. The ultimate value of benchmarks will lie in helping investors make better-informed decisions. The new generation of private markets benchmarks are more transparent, more integrated, and more relevant to investment workflows.
Preqin, a part of BlackRock, offers premier private markets performance data, with more than 140,000 transparent, customizable peer-group benchmarks and 65 reporting-grade indices, across $13tn-plus market capitalization coverage globally. We help investment professionals make confident decisions when identifying and evaluating new opportunities.
The views expressed are the opinions of VSS Capital Partners as of August 2026. They do not constitute an endorsement, recommendation, or any other advice, and are subject to change. The content does not necessarily express the views of BlackRock, Preqin, or any of their affiliates. VSS Capital Partners is not affiliated with Preqin.