A stock sitting in a brokerage account looks motionless. In the machinery underneath markets, it can have a second job. A bank, market maker or hedge fund may want to borrow it - perhaps to settle a trade, hedge a position or sell short. The owner keeps the economic exposure, the borrower posts collateral and pays a fee, and the shares eventually come home. Big institutions have collected that rent for decades. Most individual investors never saw the door.
Sharegain's business is the door, hinges included. The London company does not ask consumers to move a portfolio into a new app. It sells banks, online brokers, custodians, wealth managers and registered investment advisers the infrastructure to add fully paid securities lending to accounts they already serve. Its software and operating service cover the unglamorous sequence: find a borrower, price the loan, check collateral, track corporate actions, process recalls, allocate revenue, reconcile positions and prepare regulatory reports.
Founder and chief executive Boaz Yaari had traded derivatives and managed portfolios before forming Sharegain with Liad Amit in 2015. His observation was less technological than political: owning an asset included the right to lend it, yet the economics worked mainly for organizations large enough to support specialist desks and bilateral relationships. Sharegain called its answer Securities Lending as a Service, or SLaaS - an inelegant acronym for a tidy idea.
The product is the whole desk, not one clever button
Traditional vendors can automate slices of securities finance. A custodian can run an agency program. An ambitious broker can hire traders, operations staff, lawyers and engineers and assemble the rest. Sharegain's distinction is scope: it acts as a digital agent lender while allowing the institution to keep its custody relationship, customer interface and lending rules. A client can choose eligible securities and borrowers, review rates, approve loans automatically or individually, monitor events and recall an asset.
That control matters because lending is not free money. A borrower can default. Collateral can prove insufficient. A lent shareholder generally gives up voting rights for the loan's duration. Corporate actions and tax treatment can get complicated. Sharegain says it restricts borrowers to well-capitalized institutions, uses non-cash collateral, marks it daily and averages roughly 105 percent collateralization. Those measures mitigate risk; they do not repeal it.
“You set the terms, we do the rest.”Sharegain's compact description of SLaaS
The invoice changed the argument
The clearest answer to “what did it cost?” is also Sharegain's best sales line. For its end-to-end service, the company advertises no setup, licensing or upgrade fees. It takes an undisclosed portion of the lending revenue it generates. Fixed cost becomes variable cost; if nothing lends, there is no lending revenue to split. Public commercial percentages are not disclosed.
That arrangement attacks what tends to fail first in a do-it-yourself program: the economics arrive in the wrong order. Staff, legal agreements, borrower access, custody integrations, books and records, risk controls and regulatory reporting must exist before the first fee is earned. For Freetrade's 2024 rollout, the partners said the UK broker launched with no upfront cost and no additional headcount. An anonymized online-broker case study goes further, reporting a launch in months rather than years, 70 percent opt-in among targeted customers and a 20 percent revenue increase.
One should not mistake a vendor case study for an audited universal outcome. The figures are useful because they identify the hinge: adoption. A pristine lending engine earns nothing from customers who never enroll, and enrolled portfolios earn little when borrowers do not want their securities. Sharegain itself says a broad portfolio may produce roughly 1 to 40 basis points, while scarce “specials” can command far more. The mix changes constantly.
Once the pipes worked, persuasion became the problem
Sharegain's product history shows what changed its mind about where value lived. The early company concentrated on plumbing: matching, trading, collateral, account ledgers, loan lifecycle and billing. Its 2025 Opt-in Hub moved up the stack. It helps a broker identify relevant customers, automate targeted outreach and measure who joins. The company says one client achieved 22 percent opt-in in a week. Again, it is a single client data point, but the product decision is revealing. Installation was no longer the finish line.
The same year brought Primelocate, a fixed-price workflow for prime brokers hunting small- and micro-cap shares. Large institutional pools often lack that odd retail inventory. Sharegain's retail-facing clients may have it in thousands of scattered accounts. The company had built supply; Primelocate packaged that supply for the demand side, aiming to reduce failed trades and the costly practice of buying a security merely to lend it.
In April 2026, SLaaS MAX pushed the adoption logic further. Sharegain describes it as an always-on, AI-assisted layer that scans portfolios, ranks revenue opportunities, triggers relevant outreach and tracks performance. This is less robot trader than sales-and-operations coordinator. Ben Smith, who joined the company near its beginning and became chief AI officer, put the sensible boundary neatly: “AI should amplify expertise.”
What another founder can copy
Find revenue trapped behind a fixed operating stack. Productize the whole workflow, integrate where customers already keep their data and relationships, and price against value that actually appears. Then watch for the bottleneck to move. Sharegain automated execution first; customer enrollment became the next product.
A distribution company wearing a software badge
Sharegain raised a $5 million Series A in 2018 and a $64 million Series B led by WestCap in 2022. The latter included Citi Ventures and Optiver's strategic investment arm, firms that understand the market from the inside. More important than the logos on the cap table was the distribution bridge. Citi had already launched an automated service with Sharegain in 2021, pairing the bank's custody and lending network with the fintech's digital journey. In 2026, Citi Securities Lending Access powered an OCBC and Bank of Singapore rollout.
Other public clients map the intended market: Freetrade and BUX among online brokers; Swissquote and MoraBanc in wealth and private banking; Wealthfront in American automated investing; and flatexDEGIRO, which selected Sharegain for a rollout across millions of European accounts. Sharegain says its wider network touches 10 custodians, nine top-tier prime brokers and 27 markets, and that partners collectively serve tens of millions of underlying accounts.
The software has traders in the family
The expertise sold with the platform is unusually literal. Yaari brought derivatives and portfolio-management experience. Operations chief Matt Barnett spent years in equity-finance middle offices at Deutsche Bank, Lehman Brothers and Barclays. Senior customer hires have come from J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and post-trade specialist OSTTRA. That CV density is not decorative in a business where an obscure corporate action can become a real cash discrepancy. Sharegain's public values - transparency, control and efficiency - read less like office-wall poetry than a list of complaints about the market it entered.
It also explains an apparent contradiction in the sales material. Sharegain says a dedicated client technology environment can be deployed in under two hours, while the finished lending program goes live in weeks or months. Both can be true. Spinning up software is the short part. Agreeing borrower lists, collateral schedules, disclosures, client eligibility, data flows and oversight is the bank part. The useful promise is not instant lending. It is that a client does not have to invent each control and workflow alone.
This is where the company sits in the market: between legacy agency lenders, specialist software vendors and an institution's temptation to build. It is neither a consumer investing brand nor merely a dashboard. Regulation reinforces that position. Sharegain Ltd is authorized by the UK's Financial Conduct Authority; its American subsidiary is registered with the SEC and is a FINRA and SIPC member. The corporate record places its London headquarters at 77 Leadenhall Street, with other teams in New York and Tel Aviv.
The approach will not fit every balance sheet. A portfolio full of easy-to-borrow securities may generate pennies. Customers may dislike facilitating short selling or losing a vote while shares are out. A bank may face integration, tax or local regulatory work too heavy for the expected fees. A borrower can still fail. And a headline yield on one scarce stock says nothing about next quarter. Sharegain works best where a financial institution has meaningful eligible assets, customer trust, borrower demand and the appetite to explain risk plainly.
Its achievement is therefore more modest, and more durable, than “democratizing finance” suggests. Sharegain made an old institutional service available as a launchable business line. Then it discovered that access has two halves: the machine must work, and people must choose to use it. The lending desk fit in a box. The conversation around it did not.