Women Shaping the Future of Private Markets Technology
- 12 minutes ago
- 7 min read
Private markets are at an inflection point. The infrastructure being built today will define how the industry operates for decades to come, and the women building it at Titanbay have a clear view of what that means.
Private markets have long been defined by their complexity: fragmented data, manual processes, compliance-heavy workflows, and systems never quite designed for the task at hand. For years, the industry moved slowly, constrained by legacy infrastructure and a narrow pool of voices shaping how it evolved.
That is changing, and the women at Titanbay are helping to change it.
The Moment We Are In
Private markets are undergoing a structural shift. The introduction of ELTIF 2.0, the LTAF in the UK, and UCI Part II funds in Luxembourg has fundamentally changed what is possible. Asset managers who previously served only institutional clients are now making serious plans to distribute to wealth managers and their clients. The demand has been there for years. What was missing was the infrastructure.
"The uptake of interest and execution on UCI Part II funds, ELTIFs, and now in the UK, LTAFs, has really begun to change things," Sheryl Needham, Global Head of Sales at Titanbay. "We've seen some managers who've begun to trade and buy these products for their clients and a lot who are making serious plans around doing so. And as they do that, they realise the operational challenges they face."
Those challenges are precisely where Titanbay operates. Titanbay sits as the middleware layer, absorbing the operational complexity that would otherwise make these products prohibitively difficult to scale.
Those building this infrastructure understand just how large the opportunity is.
"Where we originally saw participation in these markets from the big global financial institutions, we are seeing that move into the tier one and tier two domestic players, and it's an exponential increase in uptake." - Sheryl Needham.
The democratisation of private markets is no longer a concept. It is being built, and Titanbay is laying the foundations.
Building the Rails, Not Just the Front End
For much of the past decade, fintech innovation concentrated on the visible layer, the sleek client portal, the clean dashboard, and the intuitive interface. The deeper infrastructure; data pipelines, compliance engines and the order management logic, remained largely untouched.
That is beginning to change in private markets, and for those building it, the distinction matters.
"For many years, fintech focused mainly on a shiny front-end system," Caroline Neylon, Head of Fund Ops at Titanbay. "Now, real innovation is happening under the surface. In private markets especially, there's a massive opportunity to modernise processes and design systems that are transparent, efficient, and scalable from day one.
You're not
Legacy wealth management platforms were not designed for private markets. They lack the flexibility to handle capital calls, notice periods, redemption gates, or the multi-jurisdiction compliance requirements that come with distributing ELTIF or LTAF structures. The infrastructure has to be built around the existing ecosystem rather than replacing it.
"The barriers to entry, with the technology that we are building, are being removed," Rosalie Dowding, Product Lead at Titanbay. "We can fit in around the existing ecosystem. Being at the forefront of working out how we integrate with all of the different parties in the ecosystem today is a genuinely exciting challenge, and one that no one else is doing in the same way."
The result is a platform that acts as a coordination and control layer, standardising processes, embedding regulatory guardrails, and integrating with custodians, transfer agents, and wealth platforms, without asking any party to retire and replace their existing systems.optimising a finished system, you're building the rails of that system."
AI and the New Possibility Space
Titanbay has been at the forefront of AI development to problems that were previously manual, slow, and error-prone. Document-heavy workflows in private markets, from fund subscription documents to KYC packs to investor reporting, generate vast amounts of structured and unstructured data. Extracting usable information from those documents was historically a labour-intensive process.
"We've introduced AI to extract structured data from complex documents," Meggie Morrison, Software Engineer at Titanbay. "It's the kind of work that changes how the whole operation runs."
For analysts and operations professionals across the platform, AI has multiplied individual impact in ways that would have seemed implausible even three years ago.
Critically, the technology does not replace the fundamentals. "The core principles haven't really changed," she adds. "You still need a good, logical foundation and good data governance, and you need to translate human intuition into something that can be understood by a computer or a system."
The same logic applies at the platform level. "We're already disrupting private markets, we're right up there on the front edge of AI technology. We're disrupting the industry on two different levels." - Ella Jones.
Automation reduces manual overhead. Intelligence surfaces insight that was previously invisible.
Solving the Complexity Problem at Scale
Private markets onboarding has historically been one of the most operationally complex processes in financial services. Suitability assessments, KYC and AML checks, jurisdictional eligibility rules, and investor classification requirements can interact in hundreds of different ways depending on the investor type, the fund structure, and the distribution channel.
Titanbay's approach has been to map that complexity into a streamlined, intelligent flow. The results speak to how much was possible with the right engineering and product thinking applied to the problem.
"We now have a conversion rate of 79% for first-time investors coming through, no matter how complex they are, from individuals to sovereign wealth funds," Rosalie Dowding, Product Lead at Titanbay. "I'm super proud of taking something that was very compliance-heavy, very complex, had almost 200 different outcomes to this compliance journey, which have now been compressed into a very simple, straightforward flow."
Modern private-markets infrastructure reflects seamless compliance and operational discipline without the friction. "Technology has shifted us from being reactive to proactive," Caroline Neylon, Head of Fund Ops at Titanbay. "We can use APIs, dashboards and workflows, and they replace ad hoc processes and manual tasks. The difference really is control.”
Why Diversity Shapes Better Advancements
Private markets, as an industry, has historically been narrow in its makeup, and it is now beginning to expand.
"Representation in private markets is bigger than just the women in finance conversation," Danielle Wilde, Marketing Lead at Titanbay. "It being quite archaic in its makeup, is also fairly archaic in its diversity of people. And as a result, there hasn't been new inventions or new ideas. When you are trying to develop new ways of doing things, it's very important that you have diversity within that."
Where leadership lacks diversity, change tends to be incremental rather than truly innovative.
"The exciting part is that it hasn't been done before," Meggie Morrison, Software Engineer at Titanbay, "There's so much room to be flexible and grow in different ways, as a company and as a product."
Private markets technology infrastructure as an industry is uncharted and is open in its possibilities. That rewards diverse thinking, and a variety of perspectives strengthens output.
The Skills That Matter Now
For women building careers in fintech, advice from those established in private-markets tech keeps returning to the same key themes.
Commercial awareness.
Understanding how your work affects revenue, risk, and client experience. "The automation will get you in the room, but understanding how businesses make money will keep you there," Caroline Neylon, Head of Fund Ops at Titanbay. "You need to know how your product will impact revenue, risk, and client experience. That gives you a lot of leverage and it helps to build confidence, so you're not just contributing, but you are shaping the outcomes as well."
Communicating your impact.
Work can be invisible if you don’t advocate for it. "If you don't explain what you're doing, then it's easy to get lost and people won't see the value," Ella Jones, Data Analyst at Titanbay. "Women in particular can hesitate to advocate for their own impact. Communicating your impact doesn't just build visibility and influence. If you combine advocating for yourself with continuously raising the standard of your work, that's really what accelerates your growth."
Curiosity, extended outward.
Understanding what surrounding teams are working on, what matters to clients, what the competitive and market context looks like beyond your immediate remit, these things are not peripheral. "Understanding your clients is really easy to overlook when you're operating inside an organisation," Sheryl Needham, Global Head of Sales at Titanbay. "Bringing that commercial and macro lens to your role is absolutely invaluable."
Embracing what you bring.
The differences in perspective, approach, and experience that come from being a woman in a predominantly male industry are not disadvantages. "Embracing the difference that you bring as a woman can actually make a huge difference to the team and the environment," Meggie Morrison, Software Engineer at Titanbay. "Curiosity, combined with new technologies, means we are all empowered to do more with our roles. That curiosity enables you to diversify your talents into many different verticals, which previously would have been out of bounds." - Rosalie Dowding, Product Lead at Titanbay.
The Opportunity Is Here
The women building this infrastructure at Titanbay are not working at the edges of that story. They are central to it: designing the onboarding flows, building the AI systems, shaping the product decisions, and contributing to a platform that is changing what is operationally possible across the industry
"There's a tendency in the industry to say democratisation of private markets as a concept. But to actually be building the rails and the plumbing that is behind this stuff, that is really exciting." - Danielle Wilde, Marketing Lead at Titanbay.
The opportunity is no longer theoretical. It is actionable. And it is here.
Titanbay is a leading private markets infrastructure provider, connecting wealth and asset managers through middleware technology. Our integrated platform delivers the technology, operations, regulation, and third-party connectivity needed across the investment lifecycle, making private markets simpler, more efficient, and more accessible.
