The question looks small enough to fit in a spreadsheet: what did this investment actually cost? For Jennifer Choi, it opens onto a much larger subject. Who gets to ask? Who has the information? And how does an investor turn an attractive promise of partnership into something that can be checked, quarter after quarter?
Choi is CEO of the Institutional Limited Partners Association, or ILPA. The initials place her on a particular side of private equity’s table. Limited partners supply capital to funds managed by general partners. The institutions she represents include pension funds, endowments, foundations and insurers. Behind the institutional language are people waiting for pensions, organizations financing their work and trustees responsible for money that belongs to someone else.
Her public career has often concerned the distance between those responsibilities and the information available to carry them out. A database can narrow it. So can a reporting template. So can a room in which investors discover that their supposedly individual frustration is shared. None of these makes an especially flamboyant trophy. A spreadsheet is unlikely to demand its own dressing room.
But the work has a recognizable shape. Choi has moved from investigating businesses to building research infrastructure, then to giving investors a common language for the terms of their partnerships. The CEO title came later. The questions were already there.
A database before a platform
Before ILPA, Choi worked as a consultant at Stax in Boston, conducting due diligence and advisory engagements for private equity and venture capital clients. Her next chapter took her into the Emerging Markets Private Equity Association, now the Global Private Capital Association. As research director, she built the industry’s first global database of private equity activity in emerging markets.
A database is a useful place to begin this story because it requires a decision about what counts. Individual investments become a body of information that other people can interrogate. The achievement sits comfortably beside her later work: both involve making scattered activity legible enough for someone else to examine.
At EMPEA she also became vice president of industry and external affairs, working on member engagement, policy frameworks and institutional partnerships. Research and representation occupied the same professional territory. Knowing what an industry is doing helps when explaining its needs; representing it brings new questions back to the research.
Her education crossed similar boundaries. She studied economics and political science at Augustana College, graduating summa cum laude, and earned a master’s in law and diplomacy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School. Her graduate thesis examined intercultural dynamics in cross-border mergers and acquisitions. Finance, institutions and the friction of working across differences were already sharing the page.
The small print gets a constituency
By July 2018, Choi was addressing Pennsylvania’s Pension Review Commission as ILPA’s managing director of industry affairs. Her subject was the evolution of transparency in private equity. The problem was practical: inconsistent reporting made it difficult for investors to understand costs and compare managers.
ILPA’s fee, expense and carried-interest reporting template had been released in January 2016. It gathered information into a common format, helping investors identify incomplete data and unusual entries. Yet the format alone could not settle the matter. Managers had concerns about implementation, and investors needed to make consistent requests.
“a single, coherent ‘ask’ of the GPs carries greater weight”
Jennifer Choi · July 2018
That observation gives her advocacy a particular texture. A collective request has to be coherent before it can become influential. An investor demanding transparency while inventing a bespoke format for every manager may help keep the reporting problem alive.
The idea is almost mischievously modest. Before asking everyone for better information, agree on what better information looks like. Then make it usable. The politics reside in the columns as much as in the speeches.
The ILPA Principles give those conversations a broader frame: alignment of interest, governance and transparency. The third edition, published in June 2019, covers fund economics, structure, key-person provisions and disclosures. Its purpose is to encourage discussion between investors and managers. The document offers a vocabulary for a partnership whose difficult moments may arrive years after the initial handshake.
A collective voice, with room for a solo
Choi spent eight years as ILPA’s managing director of industry affairs before becoming acting CEO in June 2022. During that earlier tenure, she launched its policy advocacy platform and stewarded initiatives including the Reporting Template, the Principles and Diversity in Action. On December 5, 2022, the board named her permanent CEO.
The appointment placed someone already involved in building the association’s tools in charge of its wider direction. Her responsibilities encompass engagement with industry stakeholders, education, research, membership and advocacy. The job combines the detail of a standard with the work of getting people to use it.
There is another collective voice in her life. At Fletcher, she directed an a cappella ensemble. In a 2025 interview, she recalled performing a Britney Spears song with fellow graduate students. Future diplomats and finance ministers, she remembered, were an appreciative audience. The negotiating position of a pop chorus is seldom covered in a fund agreement.
She also described singing from about age eight and joining a Grammy-winning choir after moving to Washington, with performances at the Kennedy Center and Strathmore. It is a personal history with its own substance, beyond the neat metaphor of bringing people into harmony.
Diversity in Action, which she founded in 2020, supplies a different kind of gathering. It brings LPs and GPs together around concrete work on diversity, equity and inclusion. By the end of 2022, the initiative had more than 270 signatories. Its 2023 discussions focused on measurement: what organizations tracked, how they interpreted the data and what changes followed. Here, too, a broad commitment became a set of specific questions.
The return needs a working-out column
In January 2025, ILPA released an updated Reporting Template alongside a new Performance Template. Hundreds of investors, managers and service providers had participated in the year-long process through committees, working groups and public comments. The reporting update was the first since 2016.
The distinction between the two documents matters. One concerns fees, expenses and carried interest. The other concerns the calculation of investment performance and the cash flows supporting it. An investor needs to understand both the cost of a partnership and the route by which its reported results were reached.
The updated reporting format makes internal chargebacks more visible and adds detail on external partnership expenses. ILPA intends it to replace the older template going forward for funds still in their investment period during the first quarter of 2026 and funds starting operations from January 1, 2026. Older funds outside their investment period can continue using the 2016 version.
The performance framework accommodates two calculation approaches, called granular and gross up. Managers select the version that fits how they calculate gross performance and call capital. A shared language still needs to recognize differences in the underlying machinery. Uniformity is useful when it enables comparison; the work includes deciding which differences must remain visible.
Choi’s connection to these documents reaches back to her industry-affairs years. Their evolution shows why publishing a standard is only one moment in its life. Someone has to explain it, answer questions and help it survive contact with accounting systems.
When the manager sits on both sides
By February 2026, Choi’s public conversations were addressing constrained liquidity, continuation vehicles and the arrival of retail capital. She discussed those subjects with Hugh MacArthur in a live podcast recording at PEI NEXUS in Orlando. They concern what happens when familiar partnerships acquire new structures and new participants.
A continuation vehicle puts that tension into focus. A manager transfers assets into another vehicle it manages, and existing investors face a sell-or-roll decision. The manager occupies both sides of the transaction. Price, conflicts and the time allowed for a decision become central questions.
ILPA’s continuation-fund guidance addresses compressed timelines, incomplete disclosures and the need for meaningful investor engagement. Its January 2026 disclosure template consolidates key information so investors can begin their internal analysis. In April, examples developed with Coller Capital used mock transactions to show how that disclosure might work in practice.
Selected continuation vehicles as one of their preferred paths to liquidity.
Choi wrote the foreword to that survey. Its findings put questions about liquidity beside continuing support for private equity allocations. Investors could remain committed to the asset class while wanting changes in the way partnerships operated. A preference for better terms does not require a retreat from the investment itself.
ILPA released draft updated continuation-vehicle guidance in June 2026. The public comment period closed on August 5; its public materials described final guidance as planned for later in the year. The draft emphasized process integrity, election options, conflicts, pricing validation and transparency. Each item concerns the conditions around a choice, before an investor makes it.
Teaching people to ask together
The education side of Choi’s work belongs in the same story. ILPA’s continuation-vehicle courses use case studies, group work and discussion of economic terms, governance and alignment. A resource library can hold the documents. An investment professional still needs to know how to use them when a transaction lands.
Her stated priorities in 2025 included expanding ILPA’s European community, increasing industry engagement and making executive education available to more people around the world. These ambitions connect representation with competence. A shared request becomes more useful when the person making it understands the answer.
Across her career, the recurring object is an informed partnership. At EMPEA, she helped assemble the evidence. At ILPA, she helped develop the language and the platform for investors to act together. As CEO, she oversees an organization that keeps revisiting those tools as the market changes.
That leaves a question more durable than any individual template: after the money is committed, can the investor still see clearly enough to exercise responsibility? Choi’s work follows that question into the database, the classroom, the committee and the fine print. It is a substantial itinerary for a sentence that can fit in a spreadsheet.