Managing a family office portfolio today requires more than just financial acumen. It requires a sophisticated technological "translator." Well, what does that mean? As family office portfolios increasingly shift heavily toward private markets, the traditional methods of tracking stocks and bonds are no longer sufficient to capture the full picture of a family’s wealth.
Sitting at the centre of solving this challenge is Benjamin Page-Fort, Managing Director of Private Assets at MSCI. With a career spanning both public markets and a decade spent focused on private markets, he leads MSCI’s Total Plan Manager, a platform serving several hundred family office clients.
“We started this platform with a single goal: to help families understand what they own, how their portfolios are performing, and the risks to which they’re exposed.”
Cadence challenge
The goal sounds simple. However, as Benjamin explains, the problem becomes incredibly complex as assets accumulate and families evolve. For instance, imagine a family going through succession planning. As the next generation begins to assert its influence, it may prefer digital assets over precious metals. New ownership structures need to be set up, and multiple entities accommodated. To remain on top of everything, family offices need to adjust and re-evaluate risk parameters for each family member.
Furthermore, family offices are investing in private markets in so many ways. They’re using co-mingled funds, closed-end vehicles, co-investments, and so on. And just as technology manages to catch up, with data extraction from PDFs and AI, new investment vehicles and structures pop up.
For public assets, “You could go on Yahoo Finance right now and look up a ticker, understand its price, fundamental data, and you can have that in real time,” Benjamin says. However, the reality is very different for private assets. Some hedge funds might report monthly. Private equity funds often report quarterly with a one or two-month lag. So that means a family office’s alternative investment data arrives at a very disparate cadence.
While some families are still comfortable relying on quarterly reporting, others are not. This is especially true for families with significant exposure to private markets, where understanding liquidity and portfolio value between reporting cycles is critical. Since formal valuations from GPs are typically only provided quarterly, families that need more timely insights often resort to manual workarounds to estimate their positions and liquidity exposure.
Meeting capital call requests, managing funding distributions, and ensuring the family’s expenses are covered—all of these rely on a clear, real-time view of the portfolio. Relying on outdated quarterly data just doesn’t cut it anymore.
“Understanding your liquidity is paramount these days, especially with less frequent distributions from private equity, and it's driving firms to look at more real time cash management.”
Creating a common language
To understand how Total Plan Manager helps families to harmonise their public and private holdings, one must look toward the architectural data foundation of the platform itself. Following MSCI's 2023 acquisition of Burgiss, a pioneer in private capital data and analytics, the global leader in public market indexes and analytics has been able to apply its rigorous standard of identification, classification, and governance to the often-opaque world of private assets.
As Ben explains, Total Plan Manager has access to over 38,000 private market fund track records with transparency back to inception, representing more than 50 years of history. The point is not the size of the dataset; it’s that the dataset is organised and classified in line with the public markets standard. That lets families finally ask portfolio-level questions about exposure, concentration, attribution and get portfolio-level answers in real-time.
For instance, if a family owns a private company like Stripe across multiple funds, the security master recognises and identifies it as a single company. By giving every asset a unique ID, Total Plan Manager ensures that public and private investments are organised under one clear structure, effectively allowing them to speak the same language.
Communicating with clarity
If all assets share a common language, how does Total Plan Manager address the cadence challenge inherent in private assets? The platform delivers a total portfolio Investment Book of Record (IBOR)—but unlike traditional IBORs that act as "rear-view mirrors," documenting what has already occurred, Total Plan Manager’s IBOR operates in real time. As transaction-level inputs like capital calls, distribution notices, and NAV updates flow into the system, performance and risk profiles refresh continuously rather than waiting on quarterly reporting cycles. The result is a living source of truth across public and private holdings, not a static snapshot.
Building on that real-time foundation, Total Plan Manager adds two capabilities that shift the platform from record-keeping into forward-looking portfolio management. First, a pre-trade diligence layer allows families to simulate how a prospective fund commitment will impact their specific allocations, factor exposures, and liquidity targets before any capital is deployed. Because the simulation draws on TPM's extensive dataset of private fund track records, families are stress-testing against actual market experience rather than forecasting in a vacuum. Second, a capital allocation and liquidity management layer gives families the tools to model cash flow timing across commitment pacing, unfunded obligations, and expected distributions, so they can manage liquidity demands across the total portfolio with the same rigor they apply to public market positions.
Together, these capabilities represent a step change: the IBOR tells you where you are right now, pre-trade diligence tells you where a new commitment would take you, and capital allocation planning tells you whether you can afford to get there. As Benjamin puts it, "The next real Rubicon to cross is bringing evaluated or estimated pricing for alternatives that users can view alongside their public equity and fixed income pricing every day."
Complete confidence
When asked where private markets are heading, Benjamin is refreshingly direct. “Anyone who says they know exactly where this is going beyond the next 12 or 18 months is either lying to you or naïve.” However, what he's more certain about is the principle: Families need to understand where the core value in their technology and data stack actually lives. For MSCI, it's the governed data and the Security Master that sits beneath it.
Which brings the conversation back to where it started. The question for any family office today is whether they can answer, clearly and quickly, what they own, what it's worth, and where they're exposed. If the answer requires three spreadsheets and a phone call, the translation problem is still costing them.