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The 2015 Fintech Finance 35: Mark Beeston, Illuminate Financial Management
No. 24 Mark Beeston, Chief Executive Officer


Middle and back offices were long out of the limelight and out of mind when it came time to budget for maintenance, let alone for systems upgrades. But then came postcrisis regulations laden with new compliance and transaction-work-flow requirements, and that got entrepreneurial juices flowing at places like ICAP, where credit-derivatives-processing veteran Mark Beeston in 2010 was named CEO of the posttrade risk and information business. The following year Michael Spencer, chief executive of the London-based interdealer brokerage, tasked Beeston with launching Euclid Opportunities, a strategic investment fund targeting technologies related to his division’s operations. In February 2014, with Euclid being run day-to-day by Steve Gibson and a portfolio that included open-source risk systems developer OpenGamma and hedge fund–prime brokerage networker ENSO Financial Analytics, Beeston moved on to start Illuminate Financial Management in London. Not burning any bridges, the 44-year-old remains an adviser to ENSO and is board chairman of OpenGamma and another Euclid holding, Duco, which was providing hosted reconciliation services to 26 financial institutions as of September, when it announced additional Series B funding from ICAP. In view of what Beeston perceives as “a massive amount of innovation in response to unprecedented demand for change in market infrastructure,” Illuminate is seeking to build a “connected ecosystem” consisting of strategic partnerships with, and funding from, financial companies and linkages among investors and entrepreneurs — “a uniquely aligned model with a pure capital markets focus,” as he describes it. Beeston reports that his team has visited more than 300 companies since the firm’s inception. Illuminate invested this year in collateral management solutions company CloudMargin, with Beeston, who is on its board, calling its low-cost cloud technology “transformational in the evolution of collateral processing.” Beeston himself was the largest seed investor in OpenFin, a pioneering provider of Wall Street desktop applications using the HTML5 cross-platform browser standard.
![]() 2. Jane Gladstone Evercore Partners ![]() 3. Matthew Harris Bain Capital Ventures ![]() 4. Steven McLaughlin Financial Technology Partners ![]() 5. Jonathan Korngold General Atlantic |
![]() 6. Richard Garman & Brad Bernstein FTV Capital ![]() 7. Amy Nauiokas & Sean Park Anthemis Group ![]() 8. Thomas Jessop Goldman Sachs Group ![]() 9. Meyer (Micky) Malka Ribbit Capital ![]() 10. Hans Morris Nyca Partners |
![]() 11. Maria Gotsch Partnership Fund for New York City ![]() 12. Marc Andreessen Andreessen Horowitz ![]() 13. Barry Silbert Digital Currency Group ![]() 14. Jay Reinemann Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria ![]() 15. Mariano Belinky Santander InnoVentures |
![]() 16. François Robinet AXA Strategic Ventures ![]() 17. Vanessa Colella Citi Ventures ![]() 18. Alan Freudenstein & Gregory Grimaldi Credit Suisse NEXT Fund ![]() 19. Justin Brownhill & Neil DeSena SenaHill Partners ![]() 20. Rodger Voorhies Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation |
![]() 21. Michael Schlein Accion International ![]() 22. Kenneth Marlin Marlin & Associates ![]() 23. Rumi Morales CME Ventures ![]() 24. Mark Beeston Illuminate Financial Management ![]() 25. Vladislav Solodkiy Life.SREDA |
![]() 26. Fabian Vandenreydt Innotribe SWIFT ![]() 27. Derek White Barclays ![]() 28. Alex Batlin UBS ![]() 29. Jeffrey Greenberg & Vincenzo La Ruffa Aquiline Capital Partners ![]() 30. P. Howard Edelstein REDI Holdings |
![]() 31. Nektarios Liolios Startupbootcamp FinTech ![]() 32. Roy Bahat Bloomberg Beta ![]() 33. Andrew McCormack Valar Ventures ![]() 34. Lawrence Wintermeyer Innovate Finance ![]() 35. Janos Barberis FinTech Hong Kong |