This content is from: Portfolio

The 2015 Fintech Finance 35: Mark Beeston, Illuminate Financial Management

No. 24 Mark Beeston, Chief Executive Officer

24
Mark Beeston
Chief Executive Officer
Illuminate Financial Management

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
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

Related Content