The tie-up, arriving days after BlackRock’s own push to introduce new benchmarking tools, pairs MSCI’s index expertise with UBS’s alternatives book.
MSCI and UBS have joined the broader Wall Street race to solve a problem that has quietly frustrated financial advisors for years: private markets are growing faster than the tools built to measure them.
On Thursday, MSCI and UBS announced a strategic partnership designed to bring more standardized, timely data to an asset class that has ballooned in size but remained notoriously opaque. Under the arrangement, UBS will become an early adopter of MSCI’s AI-powered private markets platform, contributing insights from its Limited Partner, wealth management and asset management businesses while MSCI supplies independent data, analytics and modeling.
The goal, the companies said, is a more connected, standardized experience across the entire private markets investment lifecycle, from fund discovery through portfolio management and reporting.
For advisors, the pitch adds to the growing array of providers promising a single system to treat private assets with the same rigor as public equities and bonds.
Henry Fernandez, MSCI’s chairman and chief executive, framed the effort as an extension of the firm’s founding mission.
“As private markets become an increasingly important part of the investment landscape, investors are looking for the insights, rigor and accessibility that they have come to expect in public markets,” Fernandez said. “By combining MSCI and UBS’s respective strengths, we aim to help build the infrastructure that can shape the future of private markets investing.”
UBS Group Chief Executive Sergio Ermotti tied the announcement to the bank’s global alternatives platform, which oversees more than $340 billion across hedge funds, private equity, private credit, real estate and infrastructure.
“This partnership builds on our long-standing relationship with MSCI and our shared ambition to increase transparency in private markets,” Ermotti said, highlighting the Swiss bank’s ambitions to “help to shape the next generation of private markets portfolio management solutions and transform the decision-making process for clients across public and private markets.”
A rush to offer transparency
The MSCI-UBS partnership lands just one day after BlackRock announced an expansion of the Preqin Benchmarks and Indices suite within its Aladdin platform. The move, BlackRock said, extends institutional-quality benchmarking into advisory and model-portfolio workflows that have historically lacked this depth of private markets data.
BlackRock’s enhanced offering, now available across Preqin Pro, Aladdin, eFront and Aladdin Wealth, covers closed-end fund-level indices built on daily cash-flow data from more than 10,000 funds representing upward of $13 trillion in assets, alongside more than 140,000 peer benchmarks.
Last year, Morningstar took its own shot at creating an all-encompassing benchmark with the launch of the US Modern Market 100 Index, which draws on Pitchbook data to track the 90 largest U.S. public companies alongside 10 of the biggest late-stage, venture-backed private firms.
Fragmented reporting and inconsistent benchmarks have long been cited by advisors as a reason for hesitating on private allocations, even as demand for diversification beyond public markets keeps climbing among high-net-worth clients and retail investors at large.
UBS’s read on the alts landscape
The MSCI tie-up also comes as UBS adopts a cautiously constructive outlook across the alternatives complex.
In UBS’s most recent semi-annual outlook report on alternative investments, portfolio manager James Pilkington described a period of stability tested by disruption within the private equity space, noting that underlying performance has remained steady even as the exit environment has yet to fully unlock. Persistently high interest rates have kept deal activity below funds’ expectations, and technology and software valuations in particular face a new layer of complexity as investors weigh artificial intelligence’s long-term effect on business models.
Joseph Sciortino, who heads UBS’s Unified Global Alternatives private credit business, pointed to stable carry and resilient credit metrics in the first quarter even as valuations softened amid spread volatility and AI-related uncertainty.
UBS’s research notes that corporate direct lending funds were largely flat in the period, as steady interest income offset markdowns tied to widening syndicated loan spreads. The firm said it sees diversification into asset-backed finance, including residential and commercial real estate debt and specialty finance, as a practical way to strengthen portfolios while preserving income-focused objectives.
“While elevated redemption activity led to increased gating across non-traded BDCs, this dynamic has not translated into meaningful fundamental stress among managers on the platform,” the report said. “Looking ahead, we believe diversification within private credit, particularly into asset-backed finance, offers attractive opportunities to enhance portfolio resilience across varying market environments.”