StreetLinx: Organizational X-Ray Vision for Securities Counterparties

Client

StreetLinx helps leading financial institutions improve connectivity with their trusted counterparties.

Prompt

How might we help buyside and sellside securities professionals better understand their network of counterparties?

Getting to proof

3iap worked with StreetLinx from early whiteboarding and journey mapping (proving the product conceptually), to user research (validating the problem), all the way through raising their first round (investor proof), onboarding their first customers (validating product-market fit) and scaling the product through their first 100 clients and dealers.

Background

Cofounders Gary & Pat left successful careers at Goldman Sachs to chase down an interesting problem, but they needed help to prove out the solution. As sellside veterans, they had extensive experience on the trading floor, talking with the world’s largest hedge funds and asset managers, connecting them on mutually beneficial trades. They were successful because they always knew the right person to call.

Problem

When you speak with 100s of clients every week, “always knowing who to call” is hard work. Keeping up with the constantly changing strategies and interest for every trader and portfolio manager — at every client — was a herculean task. Even simple tasks like looking up contact information might mean elaborate notebooks and spreadsheets, or worse, delving into the perpetually messy, incomplete data in Salesforce.

Insight

Clients want to be found. “Getting a look” on a trade helps their business, so they want their dealers to have up-to-date data on their “axe” (interest) of the day and how to get in touch. At the same time, clients wanted similar data on their dealers. As Gary said: “There’s a trade to be made here, I can feel it!”

Services

• Product discovery & user research. Facilitating buyside and sellside interviews
• Product design & prototyping. Supporting research, sales, fundraising and the final product
• Data modeling & architecture. Modeling a diverse set hedge funds / asset managers, their relationships and their complex access controls
• MVP design, development and launch. Enabling users to contribute their own data and search the network for matching counterparties

Results

• Launched MVP product in 2018
• Designs and prototypes helped client raise $MM+ seed round
• StreetLinx was acquired in 2021