In 1860, Henry Varnum Poor published a manual on American railroads to inform investors. That business became Standard and Poor’s.
The mission then was the same as it is now: build the information infrastructure for a market scaling faster than anyone can track.
Private markets is the current assignment.
The problem: a market that cannot measure itself. Performance data arrives in PDFs. Every manager reports differently. There is no agreed taxonomy, no standard for comparison.
More data is flowing through private markets than ever before… and almost none of it is comparable.
Chris Sparenberg started his career at Cambridge Associates building private markets benchmarks from the ground up. He’s now Head of Private Markets Strategy and GTM at S&P Global Market Intelligence - and he’s spent his entire career in private markets data, technology and analytics.
In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Chris and Marc cover:
The work S&P Global has done with Cambridge Associates and Mercer to create a new taxonomy and performance analytics for private markets
Why more data is creating more complexity, not less
The GP/LP disclosure challenge and how it's quietly resolving
The role played by iLEVEL as a data clearinghouse, which allows GPs to report to their LPs on a one-to-many basis
Why we're in the second inning (and what separates the firms already building from the ones just arriving)
"We want to be in the raw materials business. We want to collect data at the atomic level, enrich it, make it useful to our clients, but also really give them the tools to use it as they need to."
Listen to the full conversation here, on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
The conversation doesn’t stop here. The operators working through problems like these will be in Toronto on October 6 for The 2026 LP Tech Summit.
S&P Global Market Intelligence will be in the room, alongside senior pension, operations and technology leaders building the LP operating system.
