Episode summary
Live! Podcast shorts at Pangea, Schroders, and Illuminate Financial event in London
Alt Goes Mainstream
· · Hosts: Michael Sidgmore · Guests: Spencer Lake, Toby Bailey, Rezso Szabo, Dan Kramer, Tom Davies, Levent Altunel, Jay Wilson
Summary
The event centered on how private markets are becoming more data-driven, more standardized, and eventually more liquid, with several guests arguing that the biggest opportunities sit in post-investment workflows. Spencer Lake said banks and private markets both suffer from messy data, too many vendors, and weak transparency, and argued that regulation plus technology consolidation will force industry utilities and stronger infrastructure.
Toby Bailey described Canoe’s focus on the LP side of portfolio monitoring, where PDFs, manual extraction, and inconsistent reporting have long made data collection slow and expensive. He said the next step is using that data for benchmarking, cash-flow forecasting, liquidity stress testing, and eventually helping secondaries teams process documents faster. Dan Kramer made a similar case for AI in fund administration, arguing that managers need systems that can answer LP queries across email, fax, phone, and chat without forcing everyone into one portal.
Tom Davies said secondary trading is moving from taboo to practical necessity, especially as companies stay private longer and VCs need liquidity options. He framed Forge’s role as providing scale, data, and trust for a more structured private market, while Levent Altunel said Bunch is pushing toward an end-to-end infrastructure layer that unifies fundraising, onboarding, reporting, and fund admin.
Key takeaways
- Spencer Lake argued that private markets still suffer from fragmented data and that regulation and consolidation will push vendors toward industry utilities.
- Toby Bailey said Canoe’s edge is solving the unglamorous LP document problem first, then using that data for benchmarking, forecasting, and secondaries workflows.
- Dan Kramer argued that AI can reduce manual fund-admin work by answering LP queries across multiple channels and improving control and client response times.
- Tom Davies said secondaries are becoming normal for VCs as liquidity pressure rises and companies stay private longer.
- Levent Altunel said the biggest recurring problem for funds is disconnected data silos across assets, fund records, and LP information.
Notable quotes
“So I think you know on the back of this ability to go down to the asset level uh within documents there's a big opportunity in the secondary space”
“it's all about transparency of information because whenever you get all works well, you don't have to have full information when things are going well”
“I think the the word secondary was like a sort of Voldemort word that you should never speak as a as a VC”
How the episode opens
Everybody gets a piece. We're going mainream. Everybody's going to eat.
We're going mainream. All my family sing. See you on Main Street.
We're going mainream. From Wall Street to Melrose Avenue. We're going mainream.
venture capitalists to athletes to creators to the person who's collecting trading cards. We're going to have a collision of culture and finance. We're going Pangia, Schroeders, and Illuminate Financial organized a group of private markets participants and companies in London to discuss trends that will feature in the 2024 landscape.
As part of the event, Pangia asked Altos mainstream to sit down with some of the participants for short conversations to discuss what they are working on and to hear their views on the future of private markets. I hope you enjoy. Our first conversation is with Spencer Lake, partner at 13 books.
Spencer, welcome to this AGM short with uh Schroers and Pangia. So, pleasure to have you here. You have a fascinating background.
in your prior career in banking now as an investor. Would love to hear a bit about your background to start. Good.
Michael, thanks for thanks for having me. U yeah so I was a banker for 27 years at uh at Merrill when it was still Mel and then HSBC and and ultimately ran either cap markets globally, then the markets division globally and then the banking division globally. So actually we we span the universe of public and private um and some of our better performing businesses were in the alt space uh where we did you know alternative asset class financing around infrastructure real estate uh just sort of static assets that mapped across lots of different verticals uh and we would finance against them etc.
So, you know, sort of big fan of that space.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- private markets
- 2024 private market trends
- ai post-investment processes
- portfolio monitoring
- technology integration
Companies and tickers mentioned
- Pangea Group
- Schroders
- Illuminate Financial
- 13books Capital
- Canoe
- Jaid AI
- Forge Europe
- Bunch
- AlbionVC
Watch the episode
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
More from Alt Goes Mainstream
-
Stonepeak's Cyrus Gentry - bringing infrastructure investing to the wealth channel -
Blue Owl's Sean Connor - a growth company in a growth industry investing in megatrends -
Alts Pulse #18: The Global Boom in Alternative Investments w/ iCapital CEO, Lawrence Calcano -
Building a software investing powerhouse in the age of AI with Vista's David Breach -
ING - How to build a private markets platform within a European bank. -
Live! Armen Panossian, co-CEO of Oaktree at Brookfield Oaktree Wealth Solutions RIA Council Meeting
Alt Goes Mainstream, this episode and its artwork belong to Michael Sidgmore. Octagon is not affiliated with the show; this page is an independent summary.
