Fundraising is now a permanent state. LP expectations keep rising, and AI is reshaping what’s operationally possible. The question isn’t whether your IR infrastructure matters – it’s whether yours is built to compete.
Holland Mountain, Intapp, and Atominvest brought senior practitioners together in London to get into the detail of what leading firms are doing differently.
Six Trends Shaping Investor Experience
Holland Mountain opened with six trends redefining how GPs interact with LPs:
- System consolidation – one LP-facing platform, not five+
- Integrated tech stack – from siloed data to a 360° investor view
- Tailored user experience – the right experience for every investor type
- Co-investments – scale without scaling your team
- Reporting & DDQs – consistent, timely responses across every touchpoint
- AI use cases – automate the repetitive
The Fundraising Reality
Re-up rates have dropped materially below 50% – you can’t just enter a fundraising thinking keep the existing clients happy and it’ll be absolutely fine.
The fundraising environment has shifted in several ways at once:
- Re-up rates have fallen from an assumed 60-70% – the gap needs to be planned for, not discovered mid-raise
- Liquidity constraints and portfolio congestion mean many LPs simply can’t move at the pace they once did
- The market has bifurcated: blue-chip managers are still attracting strong demand, but so are genuine new entrants – spin-offs from proven teams with a compelling story. The established-but-not-top-tier middle ground is where it’s hardest
- Uncertainty is driving caution – LPs are harder to read, harder to pace, and less predictable on timing
- The firms managing best are the ones who planned for re-up shortfall before they launched, not after they opened the data room
Running a Tight Process: Before and After the Commitment
Momentum was a consistent theme. Once a prospect engages, every delay is a risk – they’re fielding calls from dozens of other GPs, and losing the thread is hard to recover from.
Making sure legal, compliance, finance, and operations are running at the same speed as the fundraiser is where most processes come under pressure. That’s where things fall apart: an email missed, an onboarding form asking for the same LP name six times, a DDQ response that takes a week longer than it should.
It’s like conducting an orchestra – you don’t have to play every instrument, but you are absolutely keeping everybody else on point.
External friction points are just as real as internal ones: fund administrators, legal counsel, Luxembourg-based entities. GPs don’t control all of them but remain accountable for the experience. Mapping the full process means mapping those touchpoints too.
A single LP-facing platform – consolidating data room, onboarding, and reporting into one place – removes a significant share of that friction before it has a chance to cost you momentum.
What Exceptional Servicing Actually Looks Like
Speed, quality, customisation – if you’re hitting those three things, you’re on your way to white glove service.
The panel’s framework was simple:
- Speed: can you respond before the LP has moved on?
- Quality: is the output clean, accurate, worth reading?
- Customisation: does it reflect what that specific LP actually asked for?
LP expectations aren’t uniform. Some want a slick portal experience. Others – including several large US public pension plans – still operate on printed documents and PDFs. The job is to meet both without letting either define the standard.
Differentiating at scale is the core challenge. A sovereign wealth fund and a £10m family office both deserve attentive service. The question is how you design a model that delivers quality across that range without bifurcating so visibly that smaller LPs feel it.
Delivering across all three comes down to process and infrastructure. Once the commitment is made and the fund is live, mapped processes and clear ownership matter more than team size — and so do systems that don’t require an analyst to spend two hours finding one answer.
Where AI Fits – and Where It Doesn’t
DDQs, RFPs, CRM hygiene, internal notes – these are the early wins. High-frequency, high-pain tasks that eat time without adding direct relationship value.
But the panel was clear on the limits.
Nobody I know is going to commit a billion dollars of their money through a chatbot.
The relationship, the trust, the accountability – none of that changes. What AI can do is free up the time that currently goes on repetitive work, so the people owning the relationships can actually execute it.
Data quality is the precondition. Applying AI to fragmented, inconsistent data produces fragmented, inconsistent outputs – and firms consistently underestimate the work required to get there. Governance needs to run in parallel with any rollout, particularly where outputs feed directly into LP-facing processes.
Don’t forget about your people – there’s a huge education element, and they have to be brought on that journey.
What the Next 12-18 Months Look Like
IR team structures are expected to change. The analyst-associate-fundraiser model won’t look the same as AI absorbs more of the volume work and the humans focus more on judgement, relationships, and process integrity.
A new type of role was discussed: sitting between the fundraiser and the technology layer, responsible for making both work together – part project manager, part change manager.
You’re going to see more of that in-between thing – the relationship bit, the project management bit, and the tech. Making sure people are interacting with the technology in the right way, continuing to update the data, continuing to remind people about the right behaviours.
Connected systems are the precondition for almost everything else discussed: LP queries answered in seconds rather than hours, CRM insights surfacing the right prospects before a fund has even launched. None of it works if the underlying data is fragmented, dirty, or living in someone’s head.
The firms that move fastest won’t necessarily be the ones with the most sophisticated AI. The data, the team structure, the handoff between internal and external participants. That’s the differentiator for the firms of the future.
Modernize your IR and Fundraising operations with Holland Mountain
Holland Mountain is a specialist consultancy exclusively focused on Private Markets, helping firms scale efficiently and use technology and data to gain a competitive advantage.
Our investor experience services help private capital firms modernize investor relations and create a seamless digital experience for LPs. Contact us to discuss with one of our experts.
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This article is based on a panel discussion hosted by Holland Mountain, Intapp, and Atominvest in London. The event was held under Chatham House rules; all contributions are unattributed.
