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

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< The 2015 Fintech Finance 35

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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