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For decades, investment reporting was largely built around the custodian.
That made sense when portfolios consisted primarily of publicly traded securities held across one or more custody accounts. Positions, transactions, balances and market values arrived through structured feeds, giving wealth managers and investment teams much of the information they needed to understand and report on a portfolio.
Today, the portfolio extends well beyond the custodian. UBS reported that alternatives represented 54% of U.S. family office portfolios in its 2025 Global Family Office Report, including 27% in private equity and 18% in real estate. BlackRock found that alternatives accounted for 42% of portfolios among the 175 family offices it surveyed globally. The shift extends beyond family offices. The latest CAIS-Mercer survey found that 90% of financial advisors surveyed allocate to alternatives, while 88% expect to increase allocations over the next two years.
Compared to a few years ago, there are a lot of indices available today to compare illiquid assets. That makes it relatively easier to benchmark performance across funds, managers, sectors, etc. Also, one reason why wealth exposure toward alternative investments has increased over the years.
The significance of those numbers goes beyond the growth of private markets. They point to a broader change in what constitutes the portfolio, what information is required to understand it and what firms need reporting to accomplish. Three shifts in particular are reshaping investment reporting.
1. The Definition of the Portfolio Has Changed
When alternatives made up a relatively small share of an investor’s wealth, it made sense for reporting to revolve around the assets held at custodians. Private equity, private credit, real estate and other investments could sit alongside that primary view, often tracked through separate systems, spreadsheets or supplemental reports.
That model is changing as more capital moves into private markets. The UBS and BlackRock studies show just how significant alternatives have become within family office portfolios, and the trend is increasingly evident across wealth management. When a meaningful share of an investor’s wealth sits outside traditional custody accounts, it becomes much harder to understand the portfolio by looking at custody first and alternatives second. Reporting needs to bring both together to show how wealth is allocated, where exposure sits and how the portfolio is performing as a whole.
Private investments can change how the rest of the portfolio is understood. A public equity allocation may look very different once private equity exposure is factored in, while cash balances take on greater significance when there are upcoming capital calls and other commitments to fund. The same is true for concentrations that may only become apparent when exposure across public and private investments is considered together.
This is where the scope of wealth reporting is expanding. Custody remains a critical source of investment data, but firms increasingly need to see it alongside alternatives and real assets to understand allocation, liquidity, exposure and performance across the portfolio as a whole.
2. What Happens Before the Report Matters
Bringing custody and alternatives into the same portfolio view is not as simple as connecting another data source. Custodial data is generally structured and standardized, while private investment information may come from capital account statements, capital call and distribution notices, K-1s, manager reports, portals and PDFs. Valuations may be updated quarterly rather than daily, and real assets may not have a traditional data feed at all.
Before that information reaches a report, it needs to be collected, parsed, standardized, reconciled and validated. In practice, that means retrieving statements from manager portals, emails and client forwards, extracting capital activity and valuations, reconciling cash, positions and transactions against source, and resolving breaks and exceptions before a report is run. Additionally, timing differences between private investment activity vs cash activity can become a reconciliation nightmare. If not corrected, this results in duplication and completely inaccurate performance. Most investors will never see that work, but they see the result every time they open a report. They expect a capital call to be reflected correctly, the latest valuation to appear in the right place and public and private investments to add up to a portfolio they recognize.
That is why confidence in reporting starts with confidence in the data behind it. As portfolios include more alternatives and real assets, accurately bringing together information from very different sources is what makes a trusted view of total wealth possible.
3. Reporting Is Becoming a Tool for Understanding Total Wealth
Once custodial assets, alternatives and real assets are brought together on a consistent data foundation, the role of reporting can expand. It can move beyond documenting what an investor owns and what those assets are worth to helping wealth managers and investment teams understand how the different parts of the portfolio fit together.
That changes the questions reporting can help answer. How is wealth allocated across public and private markets? Where are the largest exposures? How much liquidity is available relative to outstanding commitments? How is the portfolio performing across asset classes? How do private investments measured by IRR sit alongside public holdings measured on a time-weighted basis? Does it even pay off to stay liquid or illiquid? How are investments distributed across entities or ownership structures? Which managers, strategies or investments are contributing most to results?
Just as importantly, those questions do not require a single predefined view. A wealth manager preparing for a client meeting may want to begin with total wealth and then move into a particular asset class or manager. A family office may need to view the same investments across trusts, family members and other entities. An investment team may be more interested in performance, allocation or exposure. A trust company may need to understand assets through the lens of complex ownership structures.
The needs are different, but the underlying portfolio does not have to be. A common data foundation allows firms to move between total wealth and the accounts, entities, managers, asset classes and individual investments within it without creating separate versions of the portfolio for each purpose.
Why So Few Platforms Report Both
For most firms producing performance reports, integrating private equity and other alternatives with marketable securities is both the opportunity and the challenge. The opportunity is a single, accurate view of total wealth. The challenge is that the two sides of the portfolio behave very differently.
Marketable securities are priced daily, arrive through standardized custodial feeds, and are typically measured on a time-weighted basis, as the manager may or may not have control over cashflows. Private equity is valued quarterly, often with a lag, and its performance depends on the timing of capital calls and distributions, which is why it is measured by IRR, as the manager controls cashflows under the fund’s mandate. Reporting both correctly means handling both methodologies, reconciling both types of data and presenting the result so that an investor can read it as one portfolio.
The reporting market has largely developed around one side or the other. Many performance reporting platforms were built for marketable securities and custodial data, with alternatives added as manual entries or supplemental holdings. A smaller group of specialized platforms concentrates on private markets. Far fewer bring custody and alternative investments together in one reporting framework, and fewer still take responsibility for collecting and reconciling the data on both sides.
This is where PCR has built its strength. For decades, we have aggregated data from custodians, banks and brokers alongside capital calls, distributions, valuations and K-1s from private funds, as well as real estate and other assets that have no conventional feed. PCR’s performance engine then reports public and private investments together: time-weighted returns alongside IRR, gross and net of fees, measured against market indices, policy benchmarks and the investment policy statement, with look-through to underlying exposure. Marketable securities and private investments are each measured on their own terms, and they add up to the same total.
Reporting for the Portfolio as it Exists Today
As alternatives continue to grow, the distinction between the traditional portfolio and the alternative portfolio becomes less useful. Investors own one portfolio, even if the information about those investments comes from many different places.
Reporting increasingly needs to reflect that reality. Bringing custody, alternatives and real assets together gives firms more than a complete inventory of what an investor owns. It provides the context to understand how those investments relate to one another and what they mean for the portfolio overall.
That context is ultimately what makes reporting valuable. Whether the conversation is about performance, liquidity, allocation or a single investment, wealth managers and investment teams can start with the full picture and then focus on what matters. As portfolios continue to evolve, that ability to move easily between total wealth and the investments within it will become an increasingly important part of how firms serve their clients. The firms that do it well will be those whose reporting starts with the data on both sides of the portfolio, custody and alternatives alike.