We talk to a senior figure at one of Europe's main stock exchange operators and providers of the financial infrastructure to sectors including banking and wealth management.

With a $1.8 trillion SpaceX IPO due to set stock markets buzzing on 12 June, and Alphabet’s recently announced plans to issue $80 billion in stock, it seems that listed equities are having a "moment."

While the shift from public to private markets has been a dominant talking point over the past two decades, the public side is far from moribund. 

It is possible that even discounting hype and noise around a business such as SpaceX, the needle may be moving back in listed equities’ favour. This will interest that cluster of tech firms which provide much of the background “plumbing” for financial markets.

“I’d expect the pendulum to find a new equilibrium and some rebalancing rather than a wholesale swing back to listed markets,” Christian Kromann, group executive board member of Deutsche Börse Group, parent of SimCorp and Investment Management Solutions (IMS), told WealthBriefing in a recent interview.  “I think we will see more sophistication and discipline around when illiquidity is genuinely worth accepting and when listed markets offer the better trade-off. The likely end state is a more balanced mix of listed and private assets, which only increases the need for robust liquidity management, stress testing and integrated data across both.”

Kromann is responsible for the Investment Management Solutions (IMS) division (home to SimCorp and ISS STOX/).

Businesses like SimCorp are up against a crop of businesses such as Fiserv; Temenos; SS&C; Morningstar, Avaloq; ERI, and BlackRock Aladdin. While there are important differences between them – all firms say they're unique in some way and can push back at comparisons – there's a battle going on to achieve market share in the "plumbing" of financial services.

Results improved for Frankfurt-listed Deutsche Börse in the first quarter of this year, with net profit of €614 million ($531 million), up by 11 per cent on a year earlier, driven by a 11 per cent rise in sales revenues. The profit rise matched analysts’ forecasts. Since the start of January, shares in the group have risen more than 12 per cent. 

Public and private
The rise of alternative investments, a term including hedge funds, private market investments, commodities and forms of property, has opened a new competitive front among these big tech firms. However, public markets remain busy. 

Some financial capitals, such as London, have seen their IPO markets stagnate, while others, such as New York and Hong Kong, appear to be in a healthier condition. The public-to-private trend, may have lost some of its sparkle amidst the widely-publicised retail redemptions from private credit. The post-pandemic spike to interest rates squeezed private equity and venture capital, with longer waits for exits. However, some of the worries about private credit funds might be overblown.  

Whatever the trends at work, the rise of private markets puts a premium on accurate, look-through data in what has traditionally been an opaque area. Privately owned firms aren’t under the same heavy disclosure requirements as a publicly listed firm with quarterly reporting. With governments in Europe and the US widening access by retail investors to alternative investments, it raises the stakes on providing high-quality data. The Trump administration, for example, has loosened access rules for 401(k) retirement accounts; the European Union has its ELTIF structures, and the UK has its Long Term Asset Fund model.

“One of the most critical aspects here is having a full view across both public and private portfolios. Another one is having look-through capabilities. This allows investment managers to analyse their fund exposures right down to the underlying assets, enabling a true and comprehensive exposure analysis across all investments, both public and private. These are not 'nice-to-haves'; they are core requirements for informed decision-making,” Kromann said.

“The industry has made progress, but there is still a huge amount of untapped potential for automation in private markets, which continue to suffer from operational complexity and fragmented data,” he said. “This is not just my observation: SimCorp’s recent 2026 InvestOps report found that the share of buy-side executives who believe private markets offer the greatest opportunity for technological innovation grew from 27 per cent to 51 per cent in just one year. That’s a massive shift in focus.”

“We're seeing that the line between institutional and wealth investors in alternatives is gradually blurring. A large family office today may be allocating 35-40 per cent to private equity, private credit, and real assets. They may be doing direct deals and co-investing alongside pension funds,” Kromann said. 

“The regulatory direction is also clear: in Europe, ELTIF 2.0 is actively lowering barriers for wealth investors to access private markets, and the large alternative managers are all building dedicated wealth channels. The demand side is growing fast, and the infrastructure side must keep up. That’s where we see our role – providing the operational and analytical backbone that allows wealth players to operate with the same confidence and transparency as the largest institutions,” he said.

AI and all that
Kromann was in London when WealthBriefing questioned him about recent SimCorp’s launch of Agent Launchpad. The offering allows investment managers to discover and deploy pre-built AI agents from both SimCorp and curated partners.

“From my IMS [Investment Management Solutions] perspective, one of the most significant evolutions has been the conversation around AI and data. Initially, when generative AI arrived on the scene, many viewed the two in opposition,” he said. “By now, however, it has become abundantly clear that AI does not diminish the value of data; on the contrary, in the age of AI, data is the most valuable asset. A unified data foundation is the essential prerequisite for any meaningful and reliable AI application. Without it, you’re simply building on sand.”

He concluded by responding to the question: "How can banks and others make mass-affluent propositions work?" 

“The core challenge with the mass-affluent segment is that today's clients expect a highly personalised, digital-first experience, but the industry’s traditional infrastructure faces challenges to deliver that profitably at scale,” he said. “One of the key challenges is that mass-affluent clients typically have financial assets split across multiple institutions, yet providing an advisory service to them demands a single, holistic view and a solid approach for mass-customisation of portfolios,” he said.

Last year, WB spoke to Clearstream, the post-trade services arm of Deutsche Börse Group.