At Sampension, the problem was growth. The Danish pension provider had a private-capital portfolio demanding more from its operations, accounting and reporting. It needed room to expand while keeping control of its records. In MSCI’s published case study, the revealing detail is almost aggressively unglamorous: more than 500 investments were onboarded on time.
- Private i helps investment teams track performance, holdings and cash flows.
- Burgiss, founded in 1987, became wholly owned by MSCI in 2023.
- The advantage starts with records: where numbers came from and what they can fairly be compared with.
There is a useful way to understand MSCI Private Capital Solutions: start with the people responsible for getting the numbers right. A pension fund can own interests in many private funds, which themselves own companies, properties or loans. The portfolio has layers. So does the paperwork. The investment committee wants an answer. Somebody has to assemble it.
Five hundred investments, one operating problem
Sampension chose MSCI for a combination of technology and service support that worked with its SimCorp Dimension setup. It reported improvements in investment operations, fund accounting and reporting. The appeal was integration with an existing operating model. That is a more concrete proposition than a promise to transform investing.
“The onboarding of over 500 investments was executed on time and in alignment with our internal expectations.”
Stefan Cortz, Sampension
MSCI-published client account
The customers here are professional investors: pension plans, endowments, family offices, fund managers and financial intermediaries. They need to know what they own, how it performed and how much cash might be required next. MSCI supplies software, data and analytical tools for those jobs. It occupies the infrastructure behind an investment decision.
The useful part is underneath
Private i is the platform at the center of this offering. It brings together performance measurement, monitoring and comparisons. The Investment Book of Record supports the reconciliation and tracking of capital calls, distributions and valuations. Those three events describe much of the working life of a private-fund investment: money requested, money returned, value reported.
Private Capital Transparency goes deeper into the holdings. Its information comes from manager documents, standardized and enriched with research. An investor can examine exposure by sector or geography, or investigate the components of a holding’s return. Two differently named funds may still leave an investor exposed to similar businesses. Looking underneath the fund label makes that question answerable.
Private Capital Intel supplies another piece: comparison. Users can build benchmark groups by characteristics such as vintage, strategy, geography and size, then examine returns, multiples and public-market equivalents. A return needs context. A young venture fund and a mature buyout fund should not be treated as interchangeable contestants.
This is a competitive market. Preqin supplies private-capital performance data and benchmark tools; S&P Global’s iLEVEL handles portfolio monitoring, reporting and related workflows. MSCI’s particular combination joins Burgiss’s investor-sourced data heritage with its parent’s public-market analytics. The useful distinction lies in the data and the questions the combined tools support.
A $697 million vote for the records
Burgiss began in 1987, founded by Jim Kocis. Private i debuted in 2008. By January 2020, MSCI was ready to announce a $190 million minority investment and a strategic relationship. In October 2023, it completed the purchase of the remaining interest for approximately $697 million in cash.
For the remaining stake in 2023
$913 million aggregate investment announced by MSCI across its ownership purchases
The logic was broader portfolio analysis. MSCI already had public-market expertise; Burgiss brought private-asset records and analytical experience. Total Plan Manager now offers an integrated view across public and private investments. For an institution allocating capital across both, that connection can be more useful than another isolated report.
The commercial model follows the work: recurring subscriptions and licenses, supported by implementation and services. These are institutional relationships with ongoing data needs. In its October 2026 filing, MSCI named Private Capital Intel, Total Plan Manager and Private Capital Portfolio Management as subscription growth drivers within the business.
Make the number answerable
One modest feature captures the company’s proposition particularly well. SourceView links figures in Private i to specific pages in the client’s original documents. A reported valuation or return can be checked against the record that supplied it. That is useful during a quarterly close, an internal review or a discussion that begins with: where did this come from?
The work also crosses disciplines. In an MSCI employee profile, private-capital product manager Yana Vardarska describes collaborating across functions and locations to develop products around client needs. Financial expertise and software development have to meet somewhere. Here, they meet over the details of how an investment team actually works.
The lesson a reader can borrow is practical: preserve provenance before polishing presentation. Agree on classifications. Reconcile the flows. Choose a defensible comparison group. A dashboard becomes more useful when someone can challenge a number and follow it back through the system.
For an investment team, the starting point is a concrete question: compare a manager, inspect a concentration or plan future commitments. Those uses need different inputs. Buying access to more data helps only when the team can connect that information to its own holdings and its own decision process.
Quarterly assets, daily questions
The offering keeps expanding. In March 2026, MSCI announced its acquisition of Vantager, adding AI tools for organizing and analyzing pre-investment diligence documents. That same month, it launched daily NAV nowcasting indexes for private equity and private credit, combining private-market histories, public-market proxies and newly reported fund valuations.
Those signals are estimates. They do not make an illiquid asset instantly saleable or establish its executable price. Late reporting, incomplete holdings and poorly chosen comparison groups still matter. The promise of MSCI Private Capital Solutions is therefore quite specific: give professional investors better records and better ways to interrogate them. The judgment remains theirs.