Article

Don’t wait for the world to agree

On June 26, 1974, a 67-cent pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum was scanned in a supermarket in Ohio. Nothing unusual, right?

Except that this pack of gum made history. It was the first item ever processed using a Universal Product Code (UPC) — the black-and-white barcode that still powers retail today.

The idea for the scanner had been around since the late 1940s. Yet it took until the 1990s for barcodes to become truly global. The lesson? Data standardization takes time.

Financial data is no different. The convergence of IFRS and US GAAP started in 2002. More than twenty years later, it’s still not complete. XBRL, conceived in the late 1990s, became mandatory for SEC filings only in 2009, and in the EU in 2020.

So it took a while, but now structured formats and guidelines like XBRL, IFRS, and GAAP make reporting straightforward. Automated systems can handle them easily.

Non-public data? A completely different story. Here, golden standards are far from ubiquitous. Templates vary. Reports differ. Standards are scarce.

Several organizations try to fill the gap. ILPA created reporting templates, updated regularly. Invest Europe produced its own guidelines. INREV did the same for real estate funds, with detailed reporting standards and data definitions.

But they don’t see eye to eye. In October 2024, Invest Europe criticized ILPA’s latest quarterly reporting template as “too complicated” and warned it might produce inconsistent outputs, leaving reports “open to different interpretations.”

The irony? The very organizations tasked with creating global standards can’t agree on what those standards should be.

And if history teaches us anything – just look at the decades-long rollout of XBRL – it’s that consensus doesn’t come quickly. Invest Europe’s guidelines date back to 2015. ILPA launched its first template in 2016. INREV's launched a first version of their guidelines in 2008.

Nearly a decade later, we’re still nowhere near a single, universally adopted framework. It looks like true standardization in private market reporting is still a long way off.

Don’t want to wait? We can help you take matters into your own hands.