IC Process
How to Build a Repeatable Investment Committee Process for LPs
Most LP teams have an investment committee in name only. What a disciplined, documented IC process actually looks like — and why it matters more as regulatory and board scrutiny increases.
Matthew S. · Founder, Allocator Desk · January 2026 · 7 min read
The investment committee is one of the most important governance structures in institutional asset management, and one of the least consistently implemented. Ask ten LP teams to describe their IC process and you will get ten different answers. Some have rigorous, documented procedures with structured voting, written dissent, and timestamped decisions. Others have a conversation between two people followed by an email. Both call it an IC.
This inconsistency matters more than it used to. Board scrutiny of alternatives allocations has increased. Regulatory interest in the governance of LP investment processes is growing. And in a market where the vintage diversification and manager selection decisions made today will play out over a decade, the quality of the process matters for outcomes.
What a real IC process looks like
A disciplined LP IC process has five components that interact with each other. When any one is missing, the others degrade.
A structured memo. The starting point is a document that covers, at minimum: the manager's strategy and differentiation, the team, the track record analysis, the reference call synthesis, the portfolio construction rationale, the key risks, and the team's recommendation. This is not a slide deck. It is a written argument that forces the author to think through every dimension of the decision. Teams that skip the written memo have less rigorous discussions. The act of writing it matters.
A consistent review process. The memo should be distributed in advance, with enough time for reviewers to read it properly — not circulated twenty minutes before the meeting. The discussion should follow a consistent structure, not a free-form conversation. Each reviewer should address the same set of questions. This structure exists not to slow things down, but to ensure that every IC covers the same ground regardless of who wrote the memo or who is in the room.
Documented dissent. When committee members disagree, that disagreement should be recorded. Not to create legal exposure, but because dissent is informative. A decision made over significant objection looks different from a unanimous one — and knowing which kind it was, three years later, is useful information for the team reviewing how the investment played out.
> "The IC is not just the place where decisions get made. It is the place where the team's judgment gets recorded for the benefit of future team members."
A pass record. Decisions not to invest are as important as decisions to invest. When your team passes on a fund, the reasons should be documented with the same rigour as a commitment decision. "Fund X passed — valuation concerns, succession risk" is useful information when Fund Y comes to market two years later from the same firm.
A post-investment review loop. The IC memo from the original commitment should be readable alongside the current state of the investment. Did the key risks materialise? Did the thesis hold? Are the concerns flagged in the original memo visible in the portfolio today? Teams that don't close this loop are not learning from their decisions. They are making the same mistakes in each new vintage because the institutional record of prior thinking doesn't surface automatically.
<aside><strong>What Allocator Desk does here</strong><p>Our IC workflow structures the memo, routes it for review, captures approvals and dissent, and links the decision record to the ongoing coverage file — so the original thinking is always accessible alongside the current performance data.</p></aside>
The board conversation
A rigorous IC process is also an asset in the board conversation. Investment committees of foundations, endowments, and pension funds are asking harder questions about alternative allocations than they were a decade ago. CIOs who can show a documented, consistent process — here is how we evaluate managers, here is how decisions are made, here is the record of every IC decision for the past five years — are in a materially different position from those who cannot.
This is not primarily a legal or compliance argument. It is a credibility argument. A board that understands and trusts the process is a board that gives the investment team the latitude to make long-horizon decisions. That latitude is valuable, and it is earned through process transparency.
Topics
- IC Process
- Governance
- Fiduciary Duty
- Endowments