May 13, 2026
Head of Marketing
At qashqade, our Inside Private Markets series brings together practitioners, investors, and thought leaders who are shaping the future of private markets. We explore the forces driving structural change across the asset class. In this edition, we speak with Bart van Dijk, Managing Director, Head of Europe at the Institutional Limited Partners Association (ILPA), the global body representing the world's leading institutional investors in private markets. Bart shares his perspective on LP–GP alignment, the rise of retail capital, technology transformation, and what truly defines a great partnership in private equity.
There is a phrase Bart van Dijk returns to more than once during our conversation: building bridges. It is an apt metaphor for the work of ILPA and it describes, perhaps better than any job title could, what Bart does as ILPA's Head of Europe: connecting LPs across fragmented markets, facilitating honest dialogue between investors and fund managers, and helping the private markets industry hold itself to a higher standard.
ILPA is a lean organisation (fewer than fifty members of staff) but its influence far exceeds its headcount. With a membership spanning pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, endowments and family offices, it has become the authoritative voice on LP interests globally. Bart joined roughly 18 months ago, bringing with him a mandate to deepen ILPA's presence in Europe and make its guidance more relevant to the distinctly different landscape on this side of the Atlantic.
ILPA operates across three dimensions: as a peer-to-peer network, an educational platform, and a standards body. It is well known for its templates, whitepapers, and best practice documents that have shaped how LPs and GPs interact for decades. But Bart is quick to emphasise that the mission runs deeper than paperwork.
"We are a convenor. We bring LPs and GPs together – not for the volume of interactions, but for the quality and impact of these. We are trying to build effective bridges and enable real partnerships."
That philosophy shapes how ILPA approaches its European expansion too. With around 25% of its global membership based in Europe, the organisation is deepening its presence across key markets: from the Nordics to DACH, Benelux, France, and beyond. The goal is genuine local relevance, not simply extending a global message.
"We want to be relevant in local markets; not just in London, but in Munich, in Stockholm, in Paris. We need to meet LPs where they are."
To that end, ILPA has been hosting regional gatherings, from member events in the Nordics to industry briefings planned for Germany.
ILPA's partnerships with regional trade associations are a deliberate part of the strategy.
"They bring local depth, we bring the LP voice and a global perspective. There is a lot of win-win to be created."
Ask Bart where the industry's most significant gaps still lie, and he is precise: everything ILPA does comes back to three pillars: alignment of interest between LPs and GPs, transparency, and governance. These are priorities grounded in member surveys and data, and they manifest in some of the most pressing debates in private markets today.
Continuation vehicles offer a vivid case study. What was once an unusual tool has become commonplace, showing up with increasing frequency on the desks of LP investment teams. The alignment problem, Bart explains, is that what looks straightforward from the outside is anything but for an LP.
"For LPs, a continuation vehicle is essentially a full new investment. They need to go back to their IC, run all their internal processes. And yet the timelines being offered are sometimes barely a week. From the LP perspective, that can feel like being backed against the wall."
ILPA recommends a minimum of 20 business days for LPs to evaluate continuation vehicle decisions. In practice, that window is sometimes far shorter. The result, Bart notes, is that many LPs default to taking the liquidity, because they simply lack the bandwidth to make a considered decision in the time available. That dynamic (the illusion of choice) is precisely what ILPA's 2023 guidance, that has been recently accompanied by a new disclosure template, are designed to address.
On transparency, Bart is blunt about its potential as a competitive differentiator and how underestimated it remains. In an era when LPs are actively rationalising their GP relationships (going deeper with fewer managers) the quality of that partnership has direct commercial consequences.
As private markets open up to retail investors, ILPA has been closely tracking what this shift means for its core constituency: institutional LPs. The organisation has published a whitepaper on retailisation and is now expanding that work with a more specifically European lens, recognising that the conversations playing out on this side of the Atlantic are somewhat different.
In the US, the discussion around retail access is broad and politically charged, touching on everything from 401k plans to the democratisation of the asset class across income levels. In Europe, Bart observes, the conversation takes a different shape almost immediately.
"The innate reaction in Europe is already more nuanced. People here are already talking about ELTIFs and sophisticated distribution channels. That is actually a healthy starting point."
But the underlying concerns are shared across geographies. Institutional LPs are genuinely worried about what the influx of retail capital means for their relationships with fund managers.
"The concern is not just about returns. It is about attention. If a GP has trillions of dollars in retail capital in sight, where does their focus go? LPs invested on behalf of millions of pension beneficiaries are asking that question seriously."
With the rise of retail capital already upon us, ILPA's position is to ensure the adaptation is thoughtful. For retail investors, that means education: understanding J-curves, illiquidity premiums, and the fundamental difference between private and public markets. For GPs, it means being intentional about how retail capital is integrated, and being transparent with institutional LPs about its relative size and impact.
"Nobody wants a systemic event and everything is interconnected. You cannot pretend otherwise."
Eighteen months ago, when Bart joined ILPA, the technology conversation in LP round tables was dominated by one question: which tool are you using? Today, the language has shifted entirely. Training AI agents. Building proprietary data models. Rethinking team structures. The pace of change, he notes, is accelerating.
"When I joined ILPA, our roundtables were full of people asking ‘which tool are you using?’ Now the conversation has turned to training your own agents. It will go quick, I think."
The pace and approach varies considerably by LP type. Family offices, for example, are fairly entrepreneurial and agile.
"They are early adapters, much closer to new developments, almost like a VC in their approach."
On data privacy (a particularly sensitive topic for European LPs under GDPR and institutional governance frameworks) Bart notes that the most sophisticated organisations are creating proprietary solutions rather than relying on public AI tools.
"There is a lot of sensitivity around feeding institutional data into public systems, and rightly so. But the market will respond to the demand. Solutions are already emerging."
Looking further ahead, Bart is genuinely optimistic about what AI means for the LP profession, not as a replacement for human judgement, but as a liberator of it. The quantitative analytical work, the processing of vast data sets, the initial screening: these are areas where machine learning can meaningfully outperform human throughput. What remains irreplaceable is the partnership dimension: the trust, the relationship, the judgement calls that require genuine understanding of people and context.
"At the end of the day, nobody can replace that level of trust. The human in the loop remains essential."
What would success look like for private markets governance in five years? For Bart, the answer is simple: not having the same conversations. The continuation vehicle debate, the LPAC debate, the transparency debate; these are symptoms, he argues, not root causes.
"If we discipline ourselves to get to the root cause and actually move the needle, that is a meaningful legacy. Let's please not be having these same conversations ten years from now."
The convergence of private markets governance toward something closer to public markets standards, greater standardisation, less intentional ambiguity, clearer accountability, is the long-term trajectory he believes is both necessary and underway. ILPA's work on reporting templates, continuation vehicle guidance, LPAC effectiveness, and retail capital standards are all steps in that direction.
And underlying all of it, Bart returns to the same idea: partnership. Not as an easy word or a marketing phrase, but as a genuine operating model.
"LPs are really in it to make it work. They come from a place of positive intent, to build something that is mutually beneficial and durable. What they ask for in return is to be treated accordingly. There is nothing wrong with a difficult conversation. There is nothing wrong with different perspectives. What we need is the discipline to have those conversations honestly, and then actually act on what comes out of them."
It is a clear-eyed view of an industry that has the tools and the incentive to do better, and a reminder that the standards ILPA pushes for are not abstract ideals, but the foundation of a partnership model worth protecting.
