Jeb Altonaga, SVP and head of business development for private markets at Arcesium, told Michael Sidgmore, co-founder of Alt Goes Mainstream, that private-markets technology is barbelled. Deal tools in the front office and accounting and reporting systems in the back office are both mature, but the middle, where custodians, fund administrators and technology providers have to talk to each other, has no shared data standard.
GPs and LPs both say they want standardized data. Jeb says nobody has had an incentive to build it, so most firms still move files over SFTP, an older file-transfer method, rather than connecting through APIs.
"Everybody is building for themselves and that's where we're missing [a standard]." — Jeb Altonaga
Jeb ran relationship management and operations in Asia-Pacific for Citadel and was COO and a partner at Blue Pool Capital, the Hong Kong family office tied to Brooklyn Nets owner Joseph Tsai, so he has seen the data problem from the manager's side and the allocator's.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 55 minutes of audio, 8 minutes of reading.
Here are the 8 arguments that matter.
Alt Goes Mainstream · Oct 13, 2026 · 55m · 47m saved
With Jeb Altonaga, SVP, Head of Business Development, Private Markets at Arcesium
Key Takeaways
The middle of private-markets operations has no data standard, so every firm builds its own protocols
Large institutional LPs have to be the ones to force standardization, Jeb says
Small family offices lack the clout or the budget
Bloomberg's lasting value is its data feeds, not its terminal screen, and Jeb expects the same in private markets
Evergreen funds and a growing secondaries market need marks that can be traded against, which pushes toward real-time data
Jeb expects private credit to become transparent faster than buyout funds, because it trades more often
As AI commoditizes processing, people and culture become the edge, as Jeb saw at Citadel
A security master should sit at the center of every private-credit deal from first idea to final terms
1. A Career Across Lanes
Jeb's career cut across lanes rather than following one. After Citadel and Blue Pool Capital, he was COO of capital formation at Sandon Capital, an Australian activist fund, founded his own advisory firm, and now runs business development for private markets at Arcesium, the data platform spun out of D. E. Shaw roughly a decade ago.
He once saw that breadth as a handicap next to peers who followed the traditional path from banking into private equity. He now says it lets him see around corners that someone who stayed in one lane would miss.
Jeb Altonaga prefers private markets to banking because the work is something he can point to
"If you're a banker, you're not really building anything... there's no holes left that I can turn around and say, I dug those ditches. But in the private markets, it's much more operational. You can see what you've built." — Jeb Altonaga
His interest in data goes back to his early hedge-fund days buying mortgage pools at Countrywide. A team he calls the pit turned unstructured loan tapes into usable files by hand, over hours or days. AI now does that work in minutes.
