Brian Bejile, Octaura CEO and founder, brings 20+ years of leadership across credit markets, trading, and market innovation.
When people talk about modernization in financial markets, the conversation often starts with technology. In my experience, that misses the harder part: earning trust. A well-built platform does not guarantee adoption. Modernizing financial markets requires more than sound technology; it requires trust.
When the Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883, many New Yorkers still questioned whether it could support daily traffic. After a fall on its stairs triggered a stampede, P.T. Barnum famously led 21 elephants and 17 camels across the bridge without incident. The demonstration proved what engineering alone could not: the infrastructure could be trusted. Today, almost 140,000 people and vehicles cross it each day.
That story has always felt relevant to electronic trading. A platform can be well-built and useful, but markets do not change simply because infrastructure exists. They change when participants see it work, trust it in real conditions and begin to rely on it in the moments that matter.
That has been one of the clearest lessons from building an electronic trading platform for leveraged loans and collateralized loan obligations (CLOs). Many workflows in these large institutional markets still rely on phone calls, chats, emails, spreadsheets and fragmented data. Those processes persist not because the market lacks sophistication, but because participants have built real expertise around them.
Changing a market is a behavioral one, requiring four things: respect for existing workflows, participation on both sides, value users can experience each day and enough repetition for the new process to become routine.
Respect The Workflow Before Trying To Improve It
The most experienced market participants are often cautious adopters of new technology. That is usually not resistance; it is judgment. Traders, portfolio managers and dealers have built expertise around workflows that may be manual, but still reflect where information, liquidity and client demand actually sit.
That is why workflow fit matters. If a platform asks users to abandon what they already trust, adoption becomes harder. The better path is to make existing behaviors easier to execute and add transparency where the market has historically relied on manual coordination.
Bilateral negotiation, requests for quote (RFQ) and list trading were already part of how the market operated. The opportunity was to bring more structure, data and automation to those familiar workflows without fundamentally changing how participants transact.
In the CLO market, for example, bids wanted in competition (BWICs) have historically required manual bid collection, spreadsheets and constant follow-up. On an electronic platform, a process that once took days can be completed in under 30 minutes while keeping the underlying workflow recognizable.
Adoption Has To Be Earned On Both Sides Of The Market
Every marketplace has a version of the same problem. The buy side wants to know whether the dealers are there. Dealers want to know whether clients are there. Neither side wants to commit meaningful workflow to a network that has not yet proven it can support real activity.
We had to work through that reality from the beginning. Our loan trading platform launched in 2023 with three dealers and 34 buy-side firms. By early 2026, the network had grown to 32 dealers and more than 180 institutional participants. Within three years of launch, the platform had captured approximately 7.7% of syndicated loan trading activity, demonstrating that participation was beginning to translate into meaningful changes in behavior.
The growth did not happen all at once; it followed repeated evidence that the workflow could support real trades in real market conditions.
In a relationship-driven market, early users do more than create activity. They establish confidence that a workflow can stand up to the way the market actually trades. Over time, that confidence can turn a new platform from an interesting alternative into part of the daily infrastructure.
The Value Has To Show Up In The User’s Day
Adoption cannot be mandated. Users do not adopt a platform because it offers more functionality; they adopt it because it removes recurring friction. That value may mean fewer manual steps, faster access to counterparties, clearer evidence of liquidity or a more reliable record of how a decision was made. It also differs by participant: traders may prioritize speed and execution quality, portfolio managers may value relative value analysis and market color, risk teams may need auditable inputs and dealers may focus on responding efficiently to client demand.
We have seen that execution and intelligence are most valuable when they operate as part of the same workflow. Electronic trading can make familiar loan and CLO protocols more efficient, while live trading data provides clear pricing and liquidity context before, during and after a trade. In a market without a centralized tape for loans, combining those capabilities can narrow the gap between where participants think the market is and where risk can actually trade. The goal is not to replace market judgment, but to give participants better information with which to apply it.
The Real Change Is When The Workflow Becomes Ordinary
The most durable changes in market structure rarely feel dramatic once adopted. They become routine. A workflow that once required explanation becomes the way a desk gets something done. A process that depended on manual coordination becomes cleaner, more transparent and easier to audit. The market remains relationship-driven, but those relationships operate with better infrastructure around them.
That is how I think about modernization in the loan and CLO markets. Even markets long considered difficult to electronify can move when the value is practical and the workflow feels familiar. Change does not require participants to ignore how they already trade; it requires making familiar workflows more scalable, transparent and useful as the market outgrows legacy infrastructure.
The ultimate measure of market technology is not whether participants try it, but whether they return to it when conditions are difficult and execution matters most. That transition, from experimentation to reliance, is when adoption begins to influence market structure. Technology makes change possible, but trust, repeated utility and workflow fit make it durable.
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