Growing use by family offices of private markets and other "alternative" investments adds to the need for fast, reliable and clear data. But there are problems. This publication recently spoke to Arch, the platform, about its work and the wider story.

There has been considerable focus on how family offices and other wealth management players use alternative investments – a broad term. What, however, are the specific ways that investors fine-tune exposures and risks? 

There is no doubt that “alts” are all the rage. A recent JP Morgan Private Bank study, based on comments from 333 family offices, said forces such as inflation are encouraging family offices to expand allocations: some family offices even allocate nearly 60 per cent of portfolios to alts, about 20 per cent above the global average for single-family offices.

However, family offices often struggle with handling fragmented financial data. 

Ryan Eisenman (pictured below), CEO of alternatives management platform Arch, explores what is happening in this area. He recently spoke to Family Wealth Report. 

Ryan Eisenman

FWR: In your view, how are family offices getting things wrong in managing exposures to alternative asset exposures, and are there differences between the types (VC, private equity, credit, real estate, other)?
Eisenman: One of the biggest challenges family offices face with alternative investments is infrastructure and visibility. Portfolios are increasingly complex, spanning venture capital, private equity, private credit, real estate, and other strategies. Each asset class comes with its own structures, reporting standards, and risk profiles, which makes it difficult to form a clear, consolidated view of overall exposure, liquidity, and underlying risk.

A persistent issue is that much of this work remains highly manual. Data is often spread across spreadsheets, PDFs, emails, and multiple systems. This fragmentation makes it hard to maintain accurate, up-to-date information and limits a family office’s ability to truly understand and manage its private market investments.

While the challenges vary somewhat by asset class, the underlying problem is similar: inconsistent data and limited transparency.

FWR: How far can technology go in fixing the "pain points" of fragmented data, manual workflows, etc, and what is harder to avoid doing even with tech?
Eisenman: Family offices often lack the infrastructure to match the complexity of their portfolios. They're investing across venture capital, private equity, private credit, and real estate, but managing it all through a patchwork of spreadsheets, PDFs, emails, and portal logins. That fragmentation is where things go wrong.

Without a consolidated view, it's hard to answer basic but critical questions: What is my total exposure to a given sector? How much liquidity do I have? What do I actually own at the underlying company level across all my fund commitments? In public markets, these answers take seconds. In private markets, they can take days of manual work.

The challenges vary somewhat by asset class. Venture portfolios tend to have the widest dispersion of outcomes and the least standardized reporting. Private equity and credit are more structured but create significant operational volume over a fund's life. Real estate adds another layer with property-level data that doesn't always fit standard portfolio frameworks. Arch is solving this core problem of fragmented data and limited transparency. 

FWR: There is so much focus on private markets now – are you concerned that the technology and reporting systems are not fully fit for purpose to handle the arrival of retail/mass-affluent money into the space (often encouraged by government policy)?
Eisenman: Yes, definitely. In private markets, there are winners and losers, and it's much harder for individuals to build a diversified portfolio compared with buying an exchange-traded fund. When an institution makes a bad bet, it's a calculated risk within a broader basket. When an individual's investment goes south, it can be devastating. 

That's why Arch is focused on making private markets as easy to navigate as public markets – building tools that help anyone, from Fortune 100 institutions to first-time investors, understand and manage alternatives with confidence.

We’re often working with reporting systems that were built before they were required to report on private markets investments. This is where we can give firms access to Arch’s APIs, allowing them to adopt private markets in their systems, and pull in the latest balances and unfunded commitments into their environments. 

FWR: Please explain what Arch does that, presumably, is part of a solution? What is Arch still working on for the future? Is it adding resources, teams, investing in new capabilities, etc?
Eisenman: Arch is focused on making alternatives easier to manage across two fronts: operations and data.

On the operational side, we're automating the core workflows of private markets. Today, managing a single fund over its 10-year lifespan takes roughly 5,500 manual actions. We've automated 84 per cent of those and are building new tools to tackle the rest, including capital calls, distributions, and fund subscriptions, with the goal of turning private markets into a one-click experience.

On the data side, we're making private market investments understandable. Our new look-through tool gives investors visibility into the portfolio companies they own through their managers and exactly how much of each [fund] they hold. For example, an investor can see that they own $200,000 of SpaceX across two funds. We're also deploying AI tools that summarize manager updates, synthesize overall portfolio performance, and let clients ask plain-language questions that turn dense PDFs into simple answers.

We raised our Series B in July to invest deeply in both areas, building the AI-native experience needed to track, understand, and manage private market investments at the level clients deserve.

FWR: Masttro partnered with Arch last year – how has that kind of partnership helped the services you provide?
Eisenman: Partnerships, like those with Masttro and Archway, have strengthened our value proposition by combining Arch's deep private market data with holistic wealth reporting and institutional-grade accounting infrastructure.

Masttro provides a comprehensive view of total wealth across all asset classes, so by integrating Arch's alternative investment data into that broader picture, clients have better accuracy, cleaner aggregation, along with all of the workflow automation for alts that Arch provides (like our tools for K-1 collection and capital call wire fraud detection). 

Archway brings decades of heritage serving some of the largest family offices in the country, with nearly 600 UHNW families and over $750 billion tracked across complex portfolios, trusts, and operating entities. By integrating Arch's alternative investment data into Archway's accounting and reporting platform, we're giving joint clients a true 360-degree view of their portfolios, unified accounting, data aggregation, and reporting in a single platform. As one joint client put it, they see Arch and Archway as two parts of the same whole.

For us, these partnerships reflect a core belief: no single platform does everything. By working closely with best-in-class partners like Masttro and Archway, we can break down the legacy silos that have made private markets so difficult to manage, and deliver a more connected, professional-grade experience for family offices and advisors.