Modern Capital Podcast: Harald Collet: Who Wrote That Spreadsheet Formula?

Private credit is the fastest-growing asset class in institutional finance. The infrastructure built to monitor it has not kept pace.

LPs are still reconciling loan agency notices, compliance certificates and financial statements by hand, out of spreadsheets held together by Excel formulas nobody currently employed can explain.  The operational risk is real, and for some of the world's most important institutional investors, it's now front and center.

Harald Collet, Founder and CEO of Alkymi, has a clear vision for solving this challenge. Recognizing that private markets data will never be standardized the way public markets data does, he built Alkymi to absorb the mess, rather than wait for the industry to clean it up. The clients putting that bet to work are sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies and pension funds - with collectively over $20 trillion in AUM - for whom getting data 45 to 60 days ahead of the CIO is the difference between monitoring risk and discovering it.

In this episode of the 𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗻 𝗖𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁, Harald and Marc Andrew cover:

• Why private credit requires hundreds of data points per loan and why that number will never standardize
• What it actually takes to move a monitoring workflow off spreadsheets and into production
• Why every effort at common data formats in private markets hits the same wall
• The Forward Deployed Engineer model for getting firms through the change management they can't staff themselves
• Why Excel isn't going away and why it was never supposed to be the reporting platform

"These were young hopeful professionals that were sold on the dream of joining a glamorous firm, and they were essentially processing PDFs in the shared email inboxes for the first 18 months of their time at the firm... And we thought, this is a terrible way to work."

Private credit needs real data infrastructure. The asset class is only growing and the mess is only getting bigger. The firms still waiting for a standard are running out of time.

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