One of the most consistent themes across our conversations with private capital firms right now is the changing shape of Investor Relations, and specifically the infrastructure behind it.

A client framed it well recently. They were curious to benchmark how other firms handle portfolio data, valuation operations and investor execution. Who owns what? What systems hold up as fund complexity increases? What does good actually look like?

It's a question more firms are asking. And the honest answer is that IR has shifted considerably: in scope, in structure, and in the profiles it demands.

The rise of IR Operations

What many firms now call IR Operations has moved from the background to the centre of the investor function. In simple terms, it owns the data room. In practice, it's the operational backbone of everything LP-facing.

The emphasis has shifted from how firms tell their story to how robust and scalable the data behind it is. That doesn't mean narrative has become less important. It means narrative now has to be built on something solid.

Storytelling hasn't gone away. It's just that investors now look behind it.

The driver is straightforward: funds are more complex than they were five years ago. More strategies, more co-investments, more bespoke structures, more global LPs. The operational demands that follow have intensified accordingly.

Institutional investors want deeper look-through data. Consultants expect standardised responses. ODD processes are more forensic. And the volume and detail of DDQs and RFPs has grown significantly, with less tolerance for delays or inconsistency.

The numbers behind the workload

The scale of this shift is worth quantifying, because it explains why firms that haven't invested in IR Ops are feeling the strain.

• 87%  of PE funds now receive DDQs structured around the ILPA framework, up from a fraction of that five years ago.
• 21  sections in the current ILPA DDQ template, compared to 8 in the previous version. It's a near-tripling of scope.
• 100+  DDQs responded to annually by the average private equity firm, each containing between 50 and 300 questions.
• 40%  longer on average over the past five years, with no sign of that trend reversing.

The practical consequence is that IR teams built around individuals rather than systems, where the same information gets pulled together manually every time a questionnaire lands, are spending most of their time firefighting rather than building relationships.

What good looks like

The firms handling this well are treating IR Operations as a data hub rather than a reactive reporting function. The distinction matters.

Instead of chasing numbers across Finance, Portfolio Monitoring and the investment team each quarter, they've built structured, validated data repositories. They've created repeatable workflows. They're investing in LP portals that provide real-time or near-real-time reporting, moving away from the static PDF-by-email model that LPs increasingly find inadequate.

And they're automating. Not because it's novel, but because the volume of repetitive questionnaire work now makes manual processing genuinely uncompetitive. AI-assisted tools for pre-populating DDQ and RFP responses are already delivering significant time savings at firms that have invested in clean underlying data, with first-draft response times cut by up to 80% in some cases.

If your central dataset isn't clean, automation doesn't solve the problem. It accelerates it.

That last point matters. The technology only works if the input quality is there. Firms investing early in data governance are the ones reaping the benefits. Firms that haven't are finding that faster, more frequent questionnaires simply expose their gaps sooner.

Structure that scales

The strongest platforms we see tend to share a few characteristics.

First, clear ownership of portfolio data. That ownership usually sits within IR Ops but is tightly aligned with Finance and Valuations. There's no ambiguity about who signs off what or where the authoritative version of a number lives.

Second, narrative IR and operational IR are treated as distinct but connected functions. The people managing investor relationships aren't buried in spreadsheets. The people managing data governance aren't being pulled into roadshow logistics.

Third, systems are treated as strategic infrastructure from an early stage, not bolted on reactively when the firm reaches a certain size and the cracks become impossible to ignore.

Where it breaks down is where ownership is blurred. Reporting split across teams with no single accountable lead. Processes built around individuals rather than architecture. As fund complexity increases, that model doesn't scale, and the pressure points become visible to LPs before they become visible internally.

What this means for hiring

From a recruitment standpoint, this has opened up a distinct and growing demand for a profile that didn't exist in the same form five years ago.

We're seeing sustained interest in professionals who sit at the intersection of fund accounting, portfolio analytics, valuations and systems: people who understand data governance and investor expectation in equal measure. These aren't traditional comms-led IR hires.

It's now possible to make partner as an IR project manager. That's a structural shift in how the function is valued.

The seniority of these roles is increasing too. IR teams are becoming more structured, with a clear separation between coverage and project management functions at larger firms. Project management within IR, covering data, systems, co-investments, continuation vehicles and secondary processes, has become a career path in its own right, not a stepping stone.

Geographically, there's also a move toward localised IR teams, partly to deepen LP relationships and partly driven by regulatory factors that make local presence increasingly valuable.

Where this leaves IR as a function

IR isn't becoming less strategic. It's becoming more operationally sophisticated, and that's precisely what allows it to become more strategic again.

When the data infrastructure is secure, senior IR professionals aren't chasing numbers. They're focused on capital strategy, LP segmentation, proactive engagement and feedback loops to the investment team. The relationships that actually drive capital decisions.

IR Operations, handled well, is what creates the space for that to happen. It's no longer a support function sitting quietly in the background. It's central to how firms present themselves to the market, manage complexity and build long-term investor trust.

If you'd like to compare notes on how leading funds are structuring IR Ops, portfolio data ownership or investor execution teams, I'm always happy to trade observations.

Contact me on jodie.white@merakitalent.com or connect with me on LinkedIn