< The 2015 Fintech Finance 35

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.

 
The 2015 Fintech Finance 35

1. James Robinson III & James Robinson IV RRE Ventures 2. Jane Gladstone Evercore Partners 3. Matthew Harris Bain Capital Ventures Gold and Bitcoin Decouple. What's Driving the Divergence's? Sponsored by CME Group April 24, 2025 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