We recently celebrated Beacon’s tenth anniversary, which this year coincided with our annual Inspire conference, held on March 14th in New York City. It was very rewarding to hear about the many applications and tools that our clients, partners, and employees have been inspired to create on top of Beacon Platform.

When Kirat Singh and Mark Higgins started Beacon in 2014, they had a vision of democratizing the powerful but proprietary trading, risk, and analytics tools that were at that time available only to the largest banks. Specifically, they wanted to build a multi-asset platform that integrated research, pricing, analytics, hedging, and risk management, on top of an appropriately controlled rapid development and deployment toolset, all running on powerful and flexible cloud-native infrastructure.

10 years of experience

Now, ten years later, we can see the many fruits of their labors and the growing Beacon team, as the platform vision has been brought to life and continues to evolve. Our first client is still using Beacon for asset/liability management, on a platform that is as up-to-date as our newest client, without having to plan and execute a major upgrade or replacement. 

At Inspire we heard from some of the many other clients that have adopted Beacon over the last 10 years, learning how they are using our platform to:

• Research, price, and evaluate major alternative assets
• Capture high-volume trades and manage risks at market speed
• Replace spreadsheet workarounds for legacy systems
• Model and manage specialized securitized products
• Support hedging initiatives with broader scenario testing
• Deploy risk as a service to broader set of customers
• Enhance sales with dynamic portfolio-evaluation application
• Incorporate AI and machine learning into the decision-making process

Keeping up with the markets 

We have all been participants in some major market and technology changes over the past decade. We’ve seen enormous volatility, driven by new and unexpected behaviors. Many risk metrics demonstrated their weaknesses and inability to handle variables that were significantly outside of their expected range.

Private markets and alternative assets have grown rapidly and become a huge part of many investment portfolios. The era of cheap rates has come to an end, and inflation has reared its head with a vengeance in many markets.

As these changes are digested by the markets, they are creating both huge opportunities and significant risks. Pricing models, analytics, and risk assessments have had to be revised and revised again. Traders and risk managers must evaluate a far broader set of potential scenarios and portfolio risk must be aggregated across public and private markets and multi-asset portfolios.

And more and more are turning to our platform to keep up with the increasing speed of markets.

Planning versus prediction 

When the company was started, the founders could not and were not trying to predict the changes that would happen in the markets and in technology. But a deep background at global banks and the experience gained through multiple market events inspired the team to define the principles for a platform that would readily meet and adapt to the changes and challenges that were sure to come. Not by developing specialized features, but by delivering a general purpose platform that has more staying power than specialized ones.

For example, we could not have predicted specific market variables pushing models out of bounds and reducing confidence in risk assessments. But we did prepare for the ability to quickly adapt, test, and deploy revised models and analytics.

We could not have predicted the rapid advancement of large language models using banks of GPUs. But we did prepare for assigning specific, containerized workloads to specialized high-performance compute resources.

Thank you

Ten years ago Kirat and Mark had a vision for a cloud-agnostic application, development, and technology platform that would bring the power of the big banks’ proprietary trading and risk systems to a broader audience. A founding principle was the capability to meet, adapt to, and even anticipate changes and challenges in the markets and in technology. The resulting customizable and cloud-native platform has demonstrated the power and benefits of this approach. And the same principles that got us here are creating a solid foundation for whatever is coming next.

We are extremely grateful for the clients, partners, investors, and employees who have helped shape and guide our progress over the past 10 years. Our Beacon team is excited to see what the next 10 years and beyond will bring.