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Nine in 10 financial advisors now allocate to alternatives, and 88% plan to increase those allocations over the next two years, according to the 2025 CAIS and Mercer survey of nearly 800 advisors. As private funds take up more of client portfolios, the software that reports on them is being asked to do more than add up capital calls. Users want to know how their funds compare.
In this article, we’ll cover why private markets analytics has become a point of differentiation for wealth management software, five ways platforms can add value with private fund benchmarks, and how an embedded benchmarking tool works in practice.
Why Differentiation Is Getting Harder
Family office and RIA software providers compete on a familiar set of capabilities:
- Portfolio accounting and aggregation
- Performance reporting
- Client portals and CRM
- Alternative investment administration
- Workflow automation and integrations
Most established platforms already cover these well, so feature parity makes it hard for a buyer to justify switching. Private markets analytics is one of the few areas where a platform can still offer something its competitors don’t.
The Private Markets Analytics Gap
Allocations are growing fast. KKR’s 2025 RIA survey found that the share of RIAs planning to increase private credit allocations rose from 15% to 53% year over year, and private equity rose from 45% to 74%. More than three-quarters of respondents already use third-party platforms to manage private market investments.
Those platforms can track IRR, TVPI, DPI and RVPI. What most can’t show is whether a 15% IRR is top quartile or below median for its vintage and strategy. That gap sends advisors and family offices to separate research tools, or leaves the question unanswered.
Five Ways Embedded Benchmarks Add Value
1. Turn Standard Reporting Into a Differentiator
A family office opens a 2020 buyout fund in its reporting platform and sees a 15.2% net IRR and a 1.8x TVPI. With benchmarking built in, the same screen shows the peer median IRR, the peer median TVPI and the fund’s quartile rank. The report now explains the performance instead of just recording it.
2. Keep Users in Your Platform
An advisor who uses one tool for reporting and another for fund research has a reason to look for a single platform that does both. Adding benchmarking means more of their workflow happens in your product, from quarterly reviews to investment committee prep.
3. Support Better Investment Decisions
Benchmarks help users find which managers are beating their peer groups, which funds need a closer look, and how a prospective manager’s prior funds ranked against vintage peers. That extends a reporting platform into research and decision support.
See how benchmarking fits into your product. Dakota partners with wealth management software providers to embed private fund benchmarks across 18,000+ funds. Explore Benchmarking Partnerships →
4. Create a Premium Analytics Tier
Benchmarking doesn’t have to be bundled into the base subscription. Platforms can package it as a private markets analytics module with:
- Private fund benchmarking by vintage year
- Private equity and private credit peer comparisons
- Manager performance analysis
- Enhanced investment committee reporting
5. Add Capability Without Building a Database
Collecting, standardizing and classifying private fund performance data is a full-time research operation. Licensing it lets your engineering team focus on the product your customers pay for.
How an Embedded Benchmarking Tool Works
Dakota’s Peer Group Builder can sit inside an existing platform through an API or embedded integration. The user’s workflow:
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Select the category: asset class and sub-asset class, such as private equity and buyout.
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Select the vintage year to set the comparison group.
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Enter fund performance: net IRR, TVPI or other reported metrics.
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Retrieve the benchmark: Dakota returns the peer comparison based on available data.
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Display the results in your own interface: peer medians, relative performance, and quartile or percentile rank.
The user never leaves your platform, and your brand stays on the experience.
Who This Fits
- RIA technology: Benchmarks add value in advisor dashboards, client reviews and alternative investment research.
- Family office software: Benchmarks strengthen consolidated reporting and manager monitoring.
- Portfolio accounting: Independent comparisons sit inside existing performance reports.
- Alternative investment platforms: Benchmarks support fund evaluation and due diligence.
- Fund administration and investor reporting: Benchmarks add market context to investor-facing reports.
Partner With Dakota
Dakota maintains performance data on 18,000+ private funds, built for software teams that want to add benchmarking without building a database. Partners can:
- Embed the Peer Group Builder in existing dashboards
- Pull benchmarks by asset class, strategy and vintage through an API
- Launch a premium analytics module under their own brand
Talk to Our Partnerships Team →
