Sector fixture
In development · Month 4Diligence for emerging managers.
The ILPA Emerging Manager Toolkit of 2025, operationalised — built around the one question that decides a first-fund commitment: what is attributable to this team.
In development and well advanced. Your House is told at the introduction when it is live.
The sector
Family offices write the first institutional cheques to emerging managers, faster than pension funds and less constrained by policy statements that exclude a Fund I. About 85 percent of institutional investors have turned a manager down on operational grounds alone. ILPA published an Emerging Manager Toolkit in 2025 — the framework exists; the tooling to run it does not.
The diligence gap
The central question is not whether the strategy worked. It is whether the track record is attributable to the current entity. Most emerging managers present performance from a prior firm. Without an attribution letter, documentation of each member's role on each deal, and disclosure of what happened to the deals that did not follow the team, that record is asserted, not evidenced. A generic synthesis does not test attribution. The fixture does, and weights track-record verifiability at 35 percent — the highest single dimension in any fixture.
What the fixture produces
- A track-record attribution analysis naming which investments belong to the current entity, with an explicit prior-firm attribution-letter check.
- A prior-firm assessment covering the deals that did not follow the team — the least-disclosed, most information-dense point in the file.
- A fund-terms assessment covering key-person provisions calibrated to actual team size, seeder economics, and GP commitment.
- A Releasability Score across four named dimensions, weighted toward attribution.
What the fixture includes
Document set
- ILPA emerging-manager DDQ response
- Track-record attribution analysis
- Limited partnership agreement
- Operational infrastructure documentation
- Current portfolio (where applicable)
- Seeder or anchor-LP agreement (where applicable)
- Reference-check documentation
- GP commitment and personal financial disclosure
Risk flags
- No attribution letter from the prior firm
- Prior-firm deals not following the team, outcomes undisclosed
- Seeder revenue share above 25 percent or adverse governance rights
- Key-person provisions weak for the team size
- Fund administrator not institutional grade
- GP commitment below 1 percent of the fund
- Outsourced CCO without a documented compliance calendar
- References declined
- MFN provisions undisclosed (informational)
Releasability dimensions
- Track record verifiability35%
- Fund terms and LP alignment25%
- Operational infrastructure readiness25%
- Reference access15%
Sample output
An eight-section manager assessment — team and firm through allocation signal — with a Releasability Score weighted toward attribution verifiability and a record of cross-document findings.
Without this fixture
Survivor bias hides in plain sight: only the successful prior-firm deals followed the team. A generic synthesis treats the self-reported record as the full picture, and the bias goes undetected.
Who uses this
- Family office CIOs running seed-LP programmes who need a rigorous, repeatable attribution review.
- Fund-of-funds teams with emerging-manager mandates conducting 20 or more Fund I and II reviews a year.
- Endowment investment offices running diversification programmes that include first-time managers.
Every fixture clears the same floor the eight workflows did — measured against an authored data room before release, against the standard set out in what we measure.