InMarketing Today

The FIX Trading Community and the Investment Association published today an industry best-practice framework for electronic equity issuance, a first step towards a fully digital IPO. The framework lets investment managers, syndicate banks and vendor platforms handle bookbuilding and allocation orders for Accelerated Bookbuild Offerings through the FIX protocol, replacing a process still run largely over email, telephone and chat message. The IA represents 250 members managing £11.1 trillion in assets.

The remarkable fact here is not the technology, it is the admission: one of the most consequential processes in capital markets, deciding who gets a piece of a new issue, has been running on the same informal channels a small business uses to book a plumber. Every industry carries some version of this gap between the sophistication it markets and the plumbing it actually runs on. Closing that gap is itself a trust signal, whether or not a single customer ever reads the standard.

Audit your own client-facing processes for the same gap: where does a polished brand promise still run on email threads, phone calls or ad hoc spreadsheets behind the scenes? Fix the process before you market the polish. A published standard becomes evidence in a way a claim never can.

BNP Paribas has today taken an equity stake in OSTTRA, the post-trade solutions provider majority-owned by private equity firm KKR, joining a consortium of banks that already includes Bank of America, Barclays, Citi, HSBC, Wells Fargo and UBS Investment Bank. The consortium was first announced in February. OSTTRA said the investment reinforces its role as shared infrastructure across global financial markets.

OSTTRA's own language gives the game away: it called the investment proof of "industry confidence" before it mentioned a single product improvement. For infrastructure providers, the investor list has become the pitch deck. A roster of six blue-chip banks reassures a nervous procurement committee more effectively than any case study, because those banks have already done the due diligence a prospect would otherwise have to do themselves.

If you sell into regulated financial institutions, treat your investor and customer roster as a marketing asset in its own right, not a footnote in the funding announcement. Name the names prominently, on the homepage and in the pitch, and let the credibility of the list do work your own claims cannot.

Marketing futurist Brian Solis argued yesterday that AI agents have become market participants in their own right, citing HUMAN Security data showing traffic from AI agents and agentic browsers grew 7,851% year on year in 2025. His case: websites, pricing pages and product documentation were all built for a human on the other end of the screen, and that assumption no longer holds.

Solis's most useful idea is what he calls Agent Experience Debt: the accumulated mess of stale pricing, contradictory claims and undocumented policies that a human customer works around but an AI agent simply reads as risk and routes past. Brand has always lived in memory; Solis argues it now has to live in two kinds of memory at once, the emotional kind humans carry and the verifiable kind machines can check. A company can be adored by people and unreadable by the agents now doing the shortlisting on their behalf.

Ask your product, pricing and compliance teams a blunt question: could an AI agent evaluating your firm right now find current pricing, a clear security posture and an unambiguous claim, without hitting a dead end? If the honest answer is no, that gap is starting to cost you deals you never see contested.