The trillion-dollar securities lending market has run on instant messages for decades. Provable Markets is rewiring it with encrypted matching and a live, SEC-registered exchange.
From the outside, financial markets look like the most modern machinery humans have ever built. Look closer at securities lending - the roughly trillion-dollar business of borrowing and lending shares that underpins short selling, settlement and market liquidity - and you find something else: trades negotiated over instant messenger, breaks reconciled by hand, and positions leaking into the market before deals are even done.
Provable Markets exists to change that. Founded in 2020 and headquartered at 200 Vesey Street in Lower Manhattan, the company operates Aurora - what its founders describe as a vertically integrated Alternative Trading System for securities finance. In one lane it combines execution, clearing and settlement: an encrypted, real-time matching engine; automated post-trade lifecycle management; and direct connectivity to the market's central clearing and settlement infrastructure.
The company's roots are unusual for a Wall Street firm. The core technology traces back to academic research on encrypted dark pools using secure multi-party computation - cryptography that lets participants match prices without revealing their underlying positions. A Dutch pension fund found the research, wanted to commercialize it, and in 2020 brought in Matthew Cohen - an equity finance trader with fifteen years at Bank of America, Jefferies and Nomura - to turn it into a business.
The pairing of a trader who had watched order information leak for a career with cryptographers who had built the tools to stop it produced a specific bet: that securities lending should stop being a relationship business conducted in chat windows and start behaving like a real electronic market. Six years in, the volume numbers suggest the market is starting to agree.
"From the outside, there is always a tendency to assume that financial markets operate more efficiently than they do."— Matthew Cohen, Co-Founder & CEO
Aurora is offered as a modular, cloud-native platform with open APIs (FIX, REST, gRPC) that connects to the front, middle and back office. Four pieces do the heavy lifting.
A novel real-time, automated order-matching service - an SEC-registered ATS - that lets clients lend portfolios or borrow securities faster, with encrypted matching that prevents pre-trade information leakage.
Automates lifecycle management of returns, marks, rate changes and recalls - cutting the operational breaks and manual corrections that plague securities lending back offices.
Access to NSCC central counterparty clearing to improve counterparty risk profiles and lower risk-weighted assets (RWA) for bank and broker-dealer clients.
A reporting-agent service that helps firms meet the SEC's new securities lending transparency rule, turning a regulatory burden into a low-lift managed service.
"We call our current, live product a vertically integrated Alternative Trading System."— Matthew Cohen
Every inefficiency Aurora targets is a real cost someone pays today. Information leakage: in a chat-based market, the act of shopping an order signals intent and moves prices against you. Provable's encrypted order book lets participants see prices without giving up their positions.
Operational breaks: mismatched marks, rates and recalls generate reconciliation work and settlement fails. Trade Manager automates the lifecycle so fewer breaks happen in the first place. Overnight batch settlement: much of the market still settles in nightly batches; Aurora pushes toward straight-through processing.
Counterparty and capital cost: bilateral trades tie up balance sheet. Routing through NSCC central clearing can lower counterparty risk and free up bank capital. The difference from incumbents such as EquiLend, Pirum and GLMX is architectural - Provable owns execution through settlement as one regulated, cloud-native stack rather than bolting messaging onto legacy rails.
Agent lenders, beneficial owners, prime brokers, broker-dealers, banks and synthetic finance desks - the professionals who move the securities lending market.
B2B SaaS access, trade execution, post-trade lifecycle management, clearing connectivity and regulatory reporting - a mix of recurring and transaction-based revenue.
A FINRA member broker-dealer running a live SEC-registered ATS, SOC II and ISO 27001 certified. The compliance others treat as cost, Provable treats as a barrier to entry.
Longer term the company aims to apply the same model to Options, Swaps and other trade and post-trade heavy markets under its existing registrations.
"Customers are best served when providers collaborate to make the process low lift and low cost."— Matthew Cohen
In May 2024 Provable Markets closed an $8 million Series A led by Dialectic Capital Management, with existing investors Inkef Capital and Anthemis - the fintech VC that first introduced Cohen to the cryptography team. "Provable Markets is modernizing long-outdated securities lending infrastructure," said Anthemis's Harry Harrison.
The team is small and senior - around 18 people spanning New York and a research arm, Provable Labs, in the Netherlands. Cohen co-founded the company with CTO Ruben de Vries, and its leadership pulls from Euronext, Liquidnet and IEX. It is a group that has both run trading venues and built them.
"91 per cent growth in orders shines a light on the rapid expansion of our network with new participants bringing new liquidity to Aurora."— Matt Cohen, on Q2 2026 volumes
Research on encrypted dark pools and secure multi-party computation - later organized under Provable Labs - lays the technical foundation.
Matthew Cohen joins as CEO to commercialize the technology for securities finance, co-founding with CTO Ruben de Vries.
The SEC-registered, vertically integrated ATS launches with encrypted real-time order matching.
Provable runs the first-ever DTCC-cleared securities lending transaction and adds CCP connectivity and Trade Manager.
Dialectic Capital Management leads an $8M round with Inkef Capital and Anthemis to scale the platform.
Q2 orders rise 91% QoQ to 4.2 million with $33B executed notional across 398 million shares.
It operates Aurora, an SEC-registered Alternative Trading System for securities lending and securities finance that combines encrypted real-time order matching, automated post-trade lifecycle management, and connectivity to central clearing (NSCC) and settlement (DTC).
It was founded in 2020 by CEO Matthew Cohen - a former equity finance trader at Bank of America, Jefferies and Nomura - alongside CTO Ruben de Vries, building on cryptography research dating to around 2018.
It runs a single vertically integrated ATS spanning execution, clearing and settlement, uses encrypted matching to prevent pre-trade information leakage, and offers straight-through processing instead of overnight batch settlement.
An $8 million Series A in May 2024 led by Dialectic Capital Management, with existing investors Inkef Capital and Anthemis.
Yes. It is a FINRA member broker-dealer and SIPC participant operating an SEC-registered ATS, and is SOC II and ISO 27001 certified with a 10c-1a compliant reporting service.