Jon Chandler
Senior Research Lead
Jon Chandler has 20 years of experience in the financial services industry. Prior to joining Cutter Associates in 2014, Jon was a senior business analyst for State Street Global Advisors (SSGA), where he was involved in a number of projects for the front and middle office, including UAT design and execution for an order management system (Fidessa IMS), the implementation of a web-based due diligence platform (FundInsight), and an enterprise solution to support blended benchmarks. Prior to his project roles, Jon was a principal in fixed income trade operations at SSGA. He has extensive experience with post-trade operations and applications, such as OASYS/CTM, PORTIA, MBSExpert, and FailStation. Jon earned a bachelor of arts in history from the University of Florida and an MBA from Northeastern University.
Recent research assignments and publications include the following:
- Alternative Investment Systems
- Cutter Benchmarking: Alternative Investments
- Cutter Benchmarking: Derivatives and Collateral Management
- Cutter Benchmarking: Investment Risk
- Cutter Benchmarking: Performance Measurement and Attribution
- Derivatives and Collateral Management Solutions
- Execution Management Systems
- Managed Data Services
- Order Management Systems
- Outsourcing Solutions
- Performance Measurement and Attribution Systems
- Portfolio Analytics Solutions
- Private Debt
- Risk Management Systems
- The Evolving Front Office Support Model
Evan Reynolds
Principal, Front Office Consulting
Evan Reynolds has extensive experience helping investment managers evaluate, implement, and optimize technology solutions across the investment lifecycle. He brings a unique combination of sales, business, technology, and client engagement expertise. He has spent his career working with asset managers, asset owners, and service providers on front-, middle-, and back-office transformation initiatives, with a particular strength in investment operations, trading, portfolio management, compliance, and data workflows.
Prior to joining Cutter, Evan held senior client-facing and growth roles at Bloomberg, Enfusion, and BlackRock Aladdin, where he led complex evaluations, strategic workshops, and large-scale technology engagements for some of the industry’s largest institutions. He has extensive experience navigating RFI/RFP processes, building executive relationships, coordinating cross-functional deal teams, and helping firms define technology strategies that align with their operating models and business objectives.
He is recognized for his trusted ability to bridge business and technology stakeholders, translate complex operational challenges into actionable solutions, and drive growth through a combination of industry expertise, strategic thinking, and a highly relationship-oriented approach.
Cutter Associates is both a research consortium and global consultancy. Because of this, we can leverage our internal expertise at Cutter Consulting alongside our Cutter Research member perspectives to provide in-depth insights. Our consultants are specialists with deep industry knowledge and experience solving the most complex problems.
For this Cutter Consulting Perspective, we caught up with Evan Reynolds, Principal, Front Office Consulting, to discuss Bloomberg’s acquisition of Canoe.
Why the Canoe Deal Matters
On July 29, 2026, Bloomberg announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Canoe Intelligence (Canoe), a data management and intelligence platform for automating private markets data collection.
In this Q&A with Evan, we discuss the rationale for this move, along with trends in the industry regarding private markets.
Cutter Research: Let’s start with private markets in general first. Over the past several years, we’ve witnessed allocations to alternative assets steadily increase across the Cutter Research membership. Explain why this is happening and what this means for those firms.
Evan: For asset managers searching for (and struggling to find) alpha, these assets can offer higher rates of return compared with public markets. And for a pension fund with an eye on liabilities, alternative assets present opportunities to generate the returns needed to help close some funding gaps. These firms invest across an increasingly diverse range of private market asset classes, each bringing unique operational complexities around data, valuation, reporting, and lifecycle events.
Many of the headaches and inefficiencies with alternative assets stem from challenges inherent to private market investments. Data is often unstructured, and despite efforts over the years, no industry standard exists in how that data is communicated and reported. Latency is common, and unlike public markets, data is not publicly available. So, workflows across the front office and operations are often manual and error-prone.
Not all firms can simply “throw more bodies” at these issues, and even those that can are looking to streamline their processes.
Cutter Research: So, given some of those challenges you mention, how does this strengthen Bloomberg’s competitive positioning in the market and what strategic gap were they trying to fill?
Evan: From my perspective, this acquisition is much bigger than simply adding another data management capability. Bloomberg has long been the market leader for public market data and analytics, but private markets remain among the last areas where data acquisition and normalization are still highly manual.
Historically, Bloomberg has focused on helping investment professionals consume and analyze information. Canoe addresses a different part of the workflow ─ automating the collection, extraction, and normalization of data before it ever reaches the investment platform. That’s an important distinction because clean structured data is becoming the foundation for everything else firms want to accomplish, whether that’s portfolio analytics, risk management, client reporting, or AI-driven insights.
Having spent time at Bloomberg, I can say the firm has consistently sought ways to reduce friction in investment workflows. Bringing Canoe into the Bloomberg ecosystem appears to be another strong step in that direction, extending Bloomberg’s reach further upstream into private markets operations.
Cutter Research: Which client segments benefit most from this move?
Evan: The biggest beneficiaries are, of course, firms with meaningful allocations to private markets ─ particularly pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and diversified asset managers. These organizations often manage hundreds (or even thousands) of relationships with GPs, each delivering data in different formats and on different schedules.
Many firms still dedicate significant operational resources to collecting capital call notices, distribution statements, NAV reports, and other documents before investment teams can even leverage that information. Automating those activities can reduce operational risk while allowing teams to focus on higher-value analysis instead of admin work.
For investment management firms, the value extends beyond efficiency. Better private market data supports better portfolio oversight, improves reconciliation across front-, middle-, and back-office functions, and ultimately gives investment professionals more timely information for decision-making. As allocations continue to increase, those operational improvements become increasingly strategic.
Cutter Research: Looking forward, if this acquisition is successful, what could Bloomberg’s solutions look like in three to five years?
Evan: First, I think this will certainly be a successful acquisition. It makes strategic sense across the board, and I think the value is clear. I also think this reflects a broader shift occurring across the industry. Firms are increasingly looking for integrated platforms where possible and data has become the common thread tying those platforms together.
The long-term opportunity is for Bloomberg to create value across multiple client segments, not just for firms that use its Buy-Side Solutions.
For firms that primarily use the Bloomberg Terminal today, the acquisition has the potential to enrich the quality and accessibility of private markets information. While the Terminal has historically been strongest in public markets, over time I could envision Bloomberg making private investment data more discoverable, standardized, and easier to analyze alongside public market information.
For clients using Bloomberg’s Buy-Side Solutions, the opportunity is even broader. If Canoe’s data collection and normalization capabilities become more tightly integrated with Bloomberg’s investment management technology, firms could see a more connected workflow ─ from receiving private market documents through to portfolio management, risk, reporting, and analytics ─ with significantly less manual intervention.
Existing Canoe clients also stand to benefit. Bloomberg’s scale, data assets, and engineering resources could accelerate product innovation while providing access to a broader set of complementary capabilities. At the same time, maintaining Canoe’s openness and ability to integrate across the industry’s heterogeneous tech landscape will likely remain important, since many firms operate best-of-breed architectures rather than relying on a single vendor.
More broadly, I think this acquisition reflects where the industry is heading. Technology providers are increasingly competing not just on analytics or user experience, but on who can deliver the most complete, connected, and trusted data foundation across the investment lifecycle.
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