A long-standing divide has shaped how sustainability data flows through the investment world.
According to ACA Group, public companies have operated for years under a combination of mandatory regulatory requirements and voluntary disclosure frameworks, producing a rich and well-established body of ESG information that is freely accessible through public sources. Private markets, by contrast, have historically functioned as a near-total data blind spot.
To fill that gap, data providers have resorted to a patchwork of approaches: scanning media for references to private companies, tracing value-chain connections between public and private entities, and deploying modelled estimates where direct evidence is unavailable. The method has served its purpose up to a point, but it has consistently hampered broad-based analytics and left private markets structurally behind their public counterparts.
That gap is now narrowing at pace. AI-enabled workflow tools and increasingly sophisticated data scraping capabilities are generating a growing body of information on private companies, to the extent that evidence-based sustainability metrics for private names can now, in some cases, approach those available for public ones.
For senior leaders with oversight of ESG and compliance, this development carries a direct consequence: data scarcity can no longer be cited as a reasonable basis for lighter sustainability analysis or reporting. At the same time, private markets managers in the US are training their sights on a new fundraising constituency — the wealth segment.
Regulatory shifts at the federal level over the past year have cleared a path for broader private markets participation among US wealth clients. Full-scale adoption has not yet materialised, but the direction is unambiguous: access to private market investments is expected to widen across all wealth tiers.
The question that follows is a practical one — do wealth clients actually want sustainability-related products? Research and market observation suggest they do, though the nature of that interest varies considerably by segment.
Morgan Stanley’s 2025 global survey found that 72% of the general population described themselves as very or somewhat interested in sustainable investing, a figure that climbs to 88% among investors with more than $100k in investable assets. The generational dimension is equally striking: the same study found that 99% of Gen Z and 97% of Millennials expressed interest in sustainable investing, with notably higher levels of strong interest compared with Baby Boomers.
Among family offices, the framing of sustainability is also shifting. UBS’s 2025 Global Family Office report found that, of those family offices incorporating sustainability into their investment decisions, 46% now view it as a source of attractive opportunities — up from 42% the previous year — whilst the proportion viewing it primarily as a tool for managing financial and non-financial risks fell from 47% to 33%.
Perhaps the most commercially significant finding comes from EY’s 2025 global wealth client research, which identified a pronounced supply gap: 39% of clients across all segments expressed interest in values-based investing, including ESG and impact strategies, yet only 20% reported that their adviser had ever raised the topic with them. For asset managers, this disparity signals that sustainability data could increasingly serve as a differentiator in fundraising conversations, particularly as wealth intermediaries begin assessing products on a comparative basis.
Alongside this unmet demand sits an education deficit. More clients express interest in sustainability-related products than those who feel genuinely well-informed about them. The combined picture is one of a market where demand is running ahead of supply and, given the generational skew of that interest, the gap appears likely to widen rather than close.
Capitalising on this opportunity will require private fund managers to communicate sustainability in ways that connect meaningfully with different wealth audiences. The 2025 research points to distinct priorities at each tier. Mass affluent investors — broadly those with more than $100k in assets — tend to prioritise values alignment, alongside a need for simplicity and a foundation of trust. High-net-worth individuals above $1m share the broad focus on values alignment. At the very and ultra-high-net-worth level, above $5m to $10m, the emphasis shifts towards identifying greenfield opportunities that connect with philanthropic objectives.
Addressing these varied expectations requires communicating sustainability characteristics in a manner that is both audience-appropriate and comparable across the market. In practice, the primary benchmarking options available to private markets managers today are participation in the ESG Data Convergence Initiative (EDCI) or the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB).
EDCI has achieved meaningful uptake within certain alternatives strategies, particularly private equity and private credit, but its transparency remains limited. There is no look-through to individual peer comparables, and its relatively modest set of 18 core metrics can restrict usability. Beyond GRESB-reporting funds, most private managers therefore continue to lean on narrative disclosures backed by bespoke metrics — an approach that makes rigorous peer comparison difficult.
The constraints of existing benchmarks create both a challenge and an opening. Articulating the specific sustainability rationale behind a fund’s performance, or its alignment with a given set of values, may not always be achievable within EDCI’s current framework. Emerging data tools are beginning to target precisely this gap, with a focus on helping managers present sustainability performance in a way that is financially coherent, platform-competitive, and sufficiently distinctive to speak to particular investor groups or investment themes.
The potential influence of richer sustainability data on returns analysis adds another dimension. Establishing a meaningful correlation between sustainability characteristics and investment performance is demanding in any environment; in a data-sparse one, it is all the more so. As improved datasets become available through AI-driven processing, more rigorous analysis will become feasible — including advanced regression work, peer normalisation, and the translation of raw data into decision-useful insights. That capability is not a distant prospect. For those willing to engage with it, it exists today. What remains in shorter supply are platforms with the governance structures in place to ensure data quality and interpretive reliability.
For private fund managers seeking to get ahead of growing wealth segment demand and rising sustainability reporting expectations, several practical steps are worth prioritising.
Strengthening the governance of sustainability data is a necessary starting point — putting in place clear oversight and quality control processes to ensure that the inputs underpinning sustainability metrics are consistent, traceable, and regularly reviewed. Improving comparability across funds and strategies, through alignment with established market frameworks where feasible, while being transparent about the limitations of benchmarks such as EDCI, will support more credible performance communication.
Developing segment-specific sustainability messaging — calibrated to how different wealth audiences assess sustainability, whether through a lens of values alignment, opportunity identification, or simplicity — is equally important. Equipping client-facing teams with clear, accessible explanations of sustainability characteristics will help bridge the gap between expressed client interest and actual product understanding.
Finally, firms should be positioning themselves for more demanding analytical expectations. As data availability increases, the ability to normalise inputs, benchmark meaningfully across peer sets, and interpret results without introducing governance risk will shift from a differentiator to a baseline expectation. The age of information abundance in private market sustainability data has arrived. The question is how quickly managers choose to act on it.
Copyright © 2026 FinTech Global
