What investors want

In its 2023 report titled Broadening Access to Private Markets, the World Economic Forum noted that global private markets currently represent around $9.6 trillion in assets. But the volumes of investors and issuers could – and should – be even bigger. They’re not, because traditional capital markets simply aren’t giving investors what they want.

According to the WEF report, private investors – whether they’re mass-market retail investors, sophisticated institutional investors or high-net-worth individuals – face pain points particularly around access to markets and the overall investment experience.

Investors want easy access to capital markets

The average issuance in today’s capital markets has as many as 40 intermediaries, and the global intermediary sector extracts more than $200 billion of value from the markets every year. Investors have neither the time nor the appetite to pay for all those hurdles and barriers.

The WEF report notes that while high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth investors enjoy easier market access than their mass-market counterparts, that access typically comes through financial advisers and intermediaries. There’s scope, the report says, for innovation around products and market access.

As a Finance 3.0 pioneer, Mesh is reshaping capital markets to create an open, trusted and dynamic mesh of businesses and people trading with each other. The Mesh ecosystem takes the best of traditional finance, and elegantly reengineers, compresses and simplifies it into what will become the future of finance.

Advisers and intermediaries will always have their place. But in the Finance 3.0 world, multiple layers of costs are neither welcome nor necessary. It’s a future that everyone can participate in, and Mesh is helping to shape it.

Investors want a seamless experience

The WEF report lists a string of investor pain points: speed, transparency, standardisation, tax reporting… and the list goes on. Capital markets, as most participants currently experience them, have significant flaws and can no longer service the needs of modern investors. The technology is slow and old, and the system itself is not keeping up with the demands of today’s sophisticated and digitally-native investors.

But the problem already has a solution – as the report emphasised in one of its key findings: “Technology will be a key enabler to ensure a seamless and scaled investor journey for all stakeholders.”

That’s exactly what Mesh is doing, providing a blockchain-based, multi-sided capital markets platform for the issuance, trade, and management of digital financial assets over their full lifecycle.

Mesh takes the five main functions of the capital markets and integrates them into one seamless experience.

The elements in that single, elegant flow are:

1. Asset origination, issuance, and tokenisation.
2. Asset distribution through Primary and Secondary markets.
3. Full and final settlement of cash and security tokens.
4. Lifecycle management and asset servicing for coupon calculations, payments, and maturity management.
5. Ownership verification via an in-built asset registry.