Due Diligence Questionnaire
A standardised set of questions used by institutional investors to evaluate fund managers across operations, compliance, risk, and governance before allocating capital.
A Due Diligence Questionnaire (DDQ) is the structured document an institutional investor sends to a fund manager as part of their pre-investment evaluation. Common templates include the ILPA Due Diligence Questionnaire (for private capital) and the AIMA Illustrative Questionnaire (for hedge funds), though every institutional client will overlay their own preferred format on top.
In finance, the term most often means this investor-to-manager questionnaire, sent by super funds, asset consultants, platforms and other allocators before they invest and again at regular review points. Private equity and investor relations teams meet the same document under the same name.
The process is usually the same whatever the template: the questionnaire arrives with a deadline, its sections are split between investment, operations, compliance and legal, each owner finds or writes an answer, someone checks every answer against the current fund documents, and a senior person signs it off before it goes back. Most of the answers already exist in last year’s responses; the work is finding them and confirming they are still true.
For the fund manager, a DDQ is a recurring revenue gate: get the answers right and on time, and the mandate stays in scope; miss the timeline or fail a citation challenge, and the mandate often goes to the next manager on the shortlist.
DDQs are time-expensive precisely because the questions cycle through fund documents, performance reports, compliance records, ODD packs, and policy documents, usually all stored in different systems. Most firms still treat DDQs as a “drop everything, all hands” exercise per request, when the underlying answers are already written somewhere. The shift from manual stitching to citation-grounded automation is the highest-leverage operational change a fund manager can make.
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