Once fund data is exported for calculations, reporting or other workflows, visibility and control can quickly weaken, creating problems when investors and regulators expect a clear audit trail.

Data sovereignty is usually discussed in terms of location: which country hosts information and whether it can move across borders. Those questions are becoming increasingly urgent. BARC’s 2026 Data Sovereignty survey of 320 organisations found that 51% now rate sovereignty as very important, up from 42% in 2025.

For private equity finance teams, though, location is only one part of control because a fund can meet its hosting requirements and still lose governance over a calculation the moment data is exported from the core accounting platform into a spreadsheet. That distinction is easy to miss because the data may never leave the firm’s network.