Asset managers agree on private markets and admit they can't measure them

Nasdaq's 2026 Global Voice of the Issuer Study, run with Escalent and published September 10, reached 406 senior product professionals — 356 at asset managers, 50 at insurance firms, all at companies with $25 billion or more in assets across seven countries — and asked where their clients want to go. Private markets finished first in every region surveyed, but the number that carries the argument is the 58 percent who called private-market benchmarks their largest unmet need, with digital asset benchmarks next at 41 percent.

The sample sits at the concentrated end of the business, and the study's title still says issuer even though most respondents work at asset managers, which tells you where index providers now expect their growth to come from. Among firms serving institutions, 82 percent of Americas respondents put private markets in their top five areas of client demand, against 71 percent in the APAC group of Japan and South Korea and 67 percent across the U.K., Germany, France and Italy; private markets also rank first through the advisor channel, so the spread measures how far each market has traveled down a road everyone has already agreed to take.

A benchmark is the sentence in an investment policy statement that tells a board what an allocation is for and how anyone will know whether it worked; approve a private-markets sleeve without one and the committee has voted for exposure it cannot describe in its own minutes. That is why the benchmark answer carries more weight than the demand answer: demand was settled years ago, and the people closest to the product pipeline are now saying the measurement of it is not. The top of the list is therefore a governance finding before it is a data finding.

The AI result has a similar outline. Eighty percent of respondents use AI somewhere in product development, while only 26 percent use it across multiple stages, a spread that reads as technology but acts like the slower clock in any $25 billion organization — how long a new workflow takes to survive a large firm's approval machinery. The study's own reading holds either way: the difficulty is no longer identifying the opportunity but converting it into something that scales.

The scale findings make the point from the other end, with 71 percent saying breaking through a crowded market gets harder every year and 66 percent saying new product innovations struggle to accumulate meaningful assets — a two-thirds verdict against the launch reflex, delivered by the people who run the launches. This publication has argued that in private markets the pre-sold wrapper is the product, and that vehicles which cannot name their buyers in advance wait on the shelf; the 66 percent figure is that judgment arriving from the supply side, and it argues against answering a distribution problem with more shelf space.

The benchmark finding lands on a firm building in that exact spot: Nasdaq runs an index business — Emily Spurling, quoted in the release, is its global head of indexes — and on September 2 it closed the Dasseti acquisition, eight days before the study appeared. Spurling's framing is that managers now want "a partner in the room at the design stage," and the demand figures carry the same point regardless of who published them: private markets are the consensus across regions and channels, while the infrastructure for measuring them is what the largest buyers say they still lack.

That phrase about the design stage also describes a change in the index business itself: licensing a finished benchmark to a finished fund is a commoditized transaction; being in the room while an exposure is specified is a different contract that moves the provider upstream of the product committee. Whether buyers accept that shift depends on a problem the same study already measured, since a provider that helps define the product before the committee sees it is selling against a scale record the survey itself calls poor.

For allocators, the likely consequence is a wave of private-market index products, each of which deserves three questions before it enters a lineup: who supplies the marks underneath, how often they are struck, and what happens to the index when a vintage stops trading. A committee that cannot answer those about its own private-markets sleeve is holding an allocation it cannot yet defend in a drawdown — the exact gap the survey's respondents were pointing at when they put benchmarks at the top of their list.

Run two numbers from this study against the next edition. If the 26 percent has not moved, AI inside asset management is a tooling story whatever the 80 percent says, and the process claims will have outrun the process. If private-market benchmarks are still the largest unmet need in 2027, the industry will have spent another year building products for an exposure it has not learned to measure.