Every financial institution carries a cost nobody budgeted for.
Something as simple as receiving a dividend (ten shares of one company) might involve five custodians, six venues, three providers of corporate actions and ten investors across five different share classes, each with different tax obligations.
The result is reconciliation teams, offline processes and parallel systems doing manually what a single infrastructure should handle automatically.
"Something that sounds incredibly trivial turns into this web of really complicated translation problems."
That’s the hidden tax. And it determines whether AI in finance actually works.
Thomas McHugh is co-founder and CEO of FINBOURNE. Fifteen years inside the engine rooms of global finance taught him one thing: every institution runs the same broken infrastructure in a slightly different way.
He built FINBOURNE to solve that problem. One platform that speaks every language finance has invented, across every asset class. It now serves some of the world’s largest banks, asset managers and hedge funds, and it raised one of the largest Series B rounds in UK fintech history.
In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Thomas and Marc cover:
The insight that changes how you see every financial transaction
Why blockchain can’t solve books and records - and what the right architecture looks like
The AI prerequisite most firms are skipping - and why it’s killing production deployments
The SaaSpocalypse: which companies are genuinely at risk, and what survives
Thomas has spent a career inside this problem at some of the world’s largest institutions. This one is worth your time.
Listen to the full conversation here, on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
The infrastructure reality McHugh describes is not unique to FINBOURNE’s clients. It’s the operating condition for most private markets firms in Europe right now.
The 2026 London Private Markets Technology Summit on June 25th is where the people fixing it come together.
