Fund managers are fielding more due diligence questionnaires than ever — and the requests are getting harder. LPs are scrutinizing fund performance closely, demanding transparency across operational practices, ESG commitments, and investment strategy before committing capital. For the investor relations, legal, compliance, finance, and ESG professionals who collectively own the DDQ process, that trend means one thing: the status quo isn’t working.
Many firms still respond to DDQs the same way they did a decade ago — Ctrl+F searches through shared drives, copy-pasted answers from prior questionnaires, email chains to wrangle contributions from multiple teams, and a last-minute scramble to reformat everything before the LP’s deadline. It works until it doesn’t.
Some have tried horizontal solutions and generic AI, only to be disappointed by the results and revert to their manual efforts.
Why DDQ volume has become unmanageable
The numbers behind the DDQ burden are significant. GPs told Ontra that they manage between 15 and 30 due diligence questionnaires per week during peak fundraising periods.
Several factors push volume higher:
- Funds are growing in size and seeking capital from a broader universe of investors.
- LPs are conducting deeper diligence before committing to fixed-term, illiquid investments.
- LPs are using DDQs as their primary tool for gaining transparency into a GP’s processes, performance, and risk management.
Fundraising DDQs are only part of it, though. Operational and ESG requests arrive on a quarterly and annual basis, further stretching IR teams’ obligations.
Adding to the challenge is the lack of an industry-standard format for DDQs. ILPA templates, AIMA questionnaires, ESG-specific frameworks, and fully bespoke LP requests all land in different formats.
Every team feels the pain
DDQs are not an investor relations problem alone. This workflow pulls in numerous groups across the firm, each facing its own friction in the current process.
Investor relations
IR professionals own the DDQ process end-to-end. In practice, that means hours of searching through 100-page repositories to find a prior answer that might be relevant — then manually assessing whether it’s still current, accurate, and approved.
When precedent doesn’t exist, drafting a net-new answer requires coordinating input from legal, compliance, finance, and ESG, each with its own schedules and priorities. Without a centralized system, IR has no reliable way to see how many questions remain unanswered or whether a deadline is at risk until it’s nearly missed.
Legal and compliance
Legal and compliance teams are the last line of defense before a DDQ goes to an investor. In firms without a standardized answer library, reviews are exhausting. When an outdated or non-compliant answer slips through in one strategy, the same error is likely to appear in the next one.
Finance and ESG
Finance and ESG professionals may be asked to contribute answers to specific sections of a DDQ. These teams have to recreate answers from scratch, given that they have no tool to surface and use pre-approved options. This time-consuming process pulls them away from their strategic tasks.
Introducing DDQ from Ontra
Ontra’s DDQ is an AI-powered software solution purpose-built for private fund managers. It helps investor relations, legal, compliance, finance, and ESG teams answer, track, and submit investor requests with confidence and speed — in a single coordinated workflow, from the moment a questionnaire arrives to the moment it is returned in the LP’s preferred format.
Ontra built DDQ for the private markets specifically, drawing on the same AI infrastructure that powers the firm’s negotiation, compliance, and governance solutions.
How Ontra’s DDQ works
1. Create a precedent library
Transform completed DDQs, PPMs, policy documents, and industry templates into a structured answer bank and a single source of truth every team draws from. Legal and compliance can pre-approve language directly in the library, so IR always starts from vetted answers.
2. Digitize inbound DDQs automatically
DDQ uses AI to extract questions from any LP format — Word documents, PDFs, and uploaded templates — into a structured, digital list. IR gets an organized starting point without manual reformatting.
3. Deploy AI-powered draft responses
Once questions are digitized, DDQ’s AI suggests the most recent, relevant, and approved answer from the firm’s precedent library. For questions without a prior answer, the AI generates a draft response for the team to review and approve. Finance, ESG, and other subject matter experts can be assigned questions within their domain, along with context notes.
4. Collaborate, review, and submit
Legal and compliance review answers and apply comments in a single platform. IR tracks overall progress in real time, incorporates final edits, and exports the completed DDQ in the LP’s required format.
Key benefits of streamlined DDQs across the firm
- Operate from a single source of truth: IR, legal, compliance, finance, and ESG all work from the same system.
- Standardize answers: Legal and compliance’s ongoing reviews promote clear, consistent investor communications across every team and fund strategy.
- Complete DDQs faster: IR can breeze through repeat questions by drawing on the firm’s pre-approved answer library.
- Accelerate approvals: Reviewers work from a shared platform that surfaces the most recent, relevant, and pre-approved answers.
- Scale without adding headcount: Firms can handle growing DDQ volume across strategies without proportionally growing their IR teams.
Get started with DDQ
DDQ is the latest addition to Ontra’s AI-powered platform for private markets, joining our purpose-built negotiation, compliance, and governance solutions for the workflows that define the fund lifecycle. Whether you lead investor relations, oversee legal and compliance review, or manage ESG or finance contributions to diligence, DDQ is built for the work your team does every day.
