In September 2026, a bank Stephen Murphy once worked for became an investor in his new company. HSBC joined Promenaut as a design partner, put money into the business and agreed that its chief AI officer, David Rice, would join the board. Murphy had spent seven years at HSBC earlier in his career. There are several ways to keep in touch with a former employer. This one comes with a cap table.
Promenaut was already operating inside selected HSBC workflows when it announced its public launch on September 22. Its work included evaluating business cases and handling steps before coding begins in software delivery. Those are modest-sounding assignments beside the grand promises made for artificial intelligence. They are also places where an institution must decide what deserves doing, what a system should build and who gets to approve it.
Murphy had arrived here by a long route through financial technology. He co-founded Genesis with James Harrison in 2015, spent ten years as its CEO and handed the job to Harrison in August 2025. The bank relationship at Promenaut gives that career an unusually neat loop: the technologist who once worked within the institution now returns with a proposition for changing its work.
Learning the customer’s side of the desk
Murphy studied computer science at the University of Kent and graduated in 1999. His degree was a first. He began working on automated trading systems at Goldman Sachs, moved to Merrill Lynch in 2002 and joined HSBC in 2005. In 2008, he became HSBC’s CIO in Brazil. BTG Pactual followed in 2012. Before he had a startup to explain to banks, he had bank technology to make function.
His working life took him through London, New York, Hong Kong and São Paulo. That itinerary matters to this story because Genesis would sell into an industry that crosses borders while carrying an extraordinary amount of local complexity with it. Murphy’s biography describes experience leading technology and electronic trading teams, a combination that placed the machinery and its users within the same field of view.
He knew the familiar choice facing a bank that needed an application. It could buy a vendor’s system and live with its limits. It could assemble a team to build its own and inherit the continuing responsibility for keeping it useful. Both routes could be expensive. Neither automatically gave the institution the freedom it imagined it was purchasing. A respectable budget could disappear into the gap between those two promises.
- 1999Goldman Sachs
- 2002Merrill Lynch
- 2005HSBC
- 2012BTG Pactual
- 2015Genesis
- 2025Promenaut
Four years before the sales pitch
With Harrison, Murphy set out to give financial firms reusable software foundations they could adapt. The company called the approach “buy to build.” The phrase is compact enough to fit on a slide; the practical work underneath it was less obliging. Trading applications need speed, resilience and controls. A shortcut that compromises those requirements is merely a longer route to an unpleasant meeting.
The founders spent four years on research and development before going to market. An equity trading platform helped establish that their underlying technology could support a demanding application. A credit-insurance application for syndicated loans with ING provided another test. These were concrete exercises in earning a bank’s confidence, in an industry where an unfamiliar supplier has much more to prove than a pleasing demonstration.
Murphy’s account of that period includes the pressure of self-funding and meeting payroll. His method was to break the ambition into achievable tests across different kinds of customers and markets. There is a recognizable tension here: keep a broad enough product to justify the company’s existence, while finding sufficiently specific work to pay for its continued existence. The spreadsheet containing payroll has a very effective veto.
Making reuse respectable
By 2019, Murphy was talking about microservices, cloud adoption and the possibility of changing applications without rebuilding the whole structure around them. He also expected the people creating financial software to change. Business specialists, including former traders, could help shape applications through tools that required less conventional coding. The person who understood a market problem did not always need to write every instruction that solved it.
In May 2020, he took the technical argument to a FINOS virtual meetup. The subject was how open-source technologies could support a low-code platform for capital markets. The presentation also looked at industry initiatives such as Financial Objects and FDC3. This was a revealing venue for a founder selling to banks: a community concerned with shared technical foundations, standards and the practical work of making systems cooperate.
Open source offered Murphy a way to make existing engineering work useful again inside financial applications. The commercial proposition depended on putting those pieces together with the reliability customers required. Reuse can sound faintly unromantic beside invention. For someone responsible for a bank’s software, having fewer things to reinvent can be a considerable attraction.
“Stay extremely focused.”Stephen Murphy, 2021
When the customers also write cheques
Citi made a strategic investment in Genesis in 2020. Before investing, it tested the technology with a proof of concept for a structured-credit trading system. That sequence is worth lingering over. A bank had a particular problem, tried the platform against it and then backed the company. The relationship connected product evaluation with a financial commitment, rather than leaving the startup to trade entirely on an attractive forecast.
The financing grew. In February 2022, Genesis announced a $200 million Series C led by Tiger Global Management, with investors including Accel, GV, Insight Partners and Salesforce Ventures. The stated purpose included expanding the platform and its developer community. Money on that scale changes the demands on a founder: engineering a product and running the organization around it become increasingly different jobs.
In July that year, Bank of America, BNY Mellon and Citi invested a combined $20 million. Those names belong to institutions familiar with the cost of maintaining financial software. Their participation made the central proposition more tangible. Murphy was asking banks to put part of their development capability on a supplier’s platform; some were also willing to put capital into the supplier.
Series C led by Tiger Global. Capital for the platform and the developers building on it.
The demonstration gets easier
As Genesis grew, Murphy’s attention included the friction involved in trying its technology. In 2024, he described a free-trial program, usage-based pricing and tools intended to get developers building sooner. Create let users configure the beginnings of an application, while the Marketplace supplied components and integrations. Accessibility had become part of the product’s business strategy, alongside the technical foundations that had occupied its early years.
This is a less cinematic part of a founder’s story than a funding announcement, but it is telling. A platform can be capable and still be difficult to buy. A developer can admire the architecture and still need a working prototype before colleagues approve the project. Murphy was working on the distance between understanding the promise and being able to test it with one’s own problem.
His conversations with Sumeet Chabria also placed Genesis inside the everyday compromises of financial technology: extending vendor systems, replacing end-user computing, modernizing older applications and improving developer productivity. The range explains why the company resisted being reduced to a single trading tool. Murphy was interested in the method by which applications got built across those different situations.
A handover, then another beginning
Genesis reached its tenth anniversary in April 2025. Murphy’s anniversary reflection returned to design patterns learned in equity trading and the performance and compliance requirements they had brought into the platform. It was a founder’s account of continuity: the experience accumulated in financial institutions had become the ingredients of a business selling technology back to them.
On August 7, Genesis announced Harrison would succeed him as CEO. “Leading Genesis has been the thrill of my career,” Murphy said. In his own account of the handover, he described remaining a board advisor and significant shareholder. That is a different relationship with a company he had run for a decade: still invested in its fortunes, with the executive responsibility passing to the person who had helped start it.
Promenaut, founded in late 2025, brought him back to the challenge of coordinating work in a regulated organization. Where Genesis supplied foundations for applications, the new venture focuses on people and AI agents working under shared controls. The family resemblance is easy to see. An impressive piece of technology still has to enter an institution’s actual working life, complete with permissions, budgets and someone accountable for the result.
How can banks build and adapt their applications?
How can people and AI agents work under shared controls?
Who approved the robot?
Promenaut’s launch announcement put total funding at $8.9 million, including HSBC’s investment. Its proposed operating layer includes permissions, audit trails and human oversight. The ambition is to coordinate AI-enabled work so an organization can understand and control what happens across a workflow. Murphy’s complaint is familiar from his earlier career: introducing a new tool leaves much of the old difficulty intact if the surrounding process stays awkward.
His recent public posts also contain something more companionable than architecture diagrams. He described gathering the Promenaut team in London and organizing the company’s first corporate padel tournament, with customers, investors, partners and friends on court. He anticipated some competitive play. Procurement may require restraint; evidently the tournament invitation allowed a little more speculation about the opposition.
The court is a small detail, but a useful one in a career otherwise narrated through platforms and banks. Murphy continues to assemble people around a technical proposition, whether the immediate task is developing a product, testing it with a customer or arranging an afternoon’s competition. His latest venture is again being tested inside a financial institution. This time, a former employer is helping to design it. The relationship has changed; the work remains close to home.