Mark Govoni
‘Member community’, ‘client-centric’, ‘client-driven innovation’. These terms are used so often across our industry that they risk losing meaning. Yet for us at Liquidnet, they have never been marketing phrases. They are the organising principles that have guided our firm from its earliest days and continue to shape how we serve the buy-side today.
As we approach our 25th anniversary, we have been reflecting on what has allowed Liquidnet to endure and thrive through multiple market cycles, regulatory shifts and technology revolutions. The answer is not found in a single product or platform. It lies in the community we’ve built. A global network of buy-side Members who choose to collaborate with us not only as clients but as partners in innovation.
Innovation isn’t a solo sport
Breakthroughs rarely arrive fully formed from behind closed doors. The most meaningful advances we’ve made, on liquidity discovery, execution quality, analytics and workflow, have emerged from genuine dialogue with traders who live the challenges we aim to solve. That conviction is formalised in Liquidnet Labs, our innovation environment where Members engage with product and
Scott O’Brien
engineering at inception. Liquidnet Labs is where we test prototypes against real-world constraints, integrate feedback while it still matters, and shorten the distance between an idea and a tool that delivers on the desk. It is also how we keep our product roadmap honest: relevant, not fashionable; robust, not performative.
Labs is more than a research and development label. It has a track record of shipping features that started as Member-driven experiments and matured into widely used capabilities, proof that co-creation can scale. One early example frequently cited by clients and media alike is Surge Capture, which originated in Labs sessions and remains a distinctive part of our toolkit.
“The most valuable feature we can deliver is relevance. If it doesn’t move the needle for our Members on the desk, it doesn’t ship,” explains O’Brien.
Investing in people, not just platforms
Technology is only as powerful as the people who wield it. That is why we built Liquidnet University nearly two decades ago: to invest in the skills, judgment, and leadership capacity of the buy-side professionals we serve. Today, the University runs two complementary programmes that reflect the breadth of our community and the depth of its ambition.
Headway is designed for senior and head traders. It creates space to step back from the immediacy of the screen, interrogate emerging market structure, and exchange perspectives with peers facing similar decisions: how to lead a desk, measure success beyond fills, and shape firm-wide execution strategy.
Jeff Schwartzman
Gateway focuses on rising talent, the early- and mid-career traders who will set the tone for the next decade. Its purpose is to accelerate capability: deepen understanding of workflows, sharpen execution discipline, and broaden exposure to the technologies and relationships that matter. The result is a more confident, better-equipped cohort ready to contribute on the desk and influence the investment process sooner.
Together, Headway and Gateway have a simple goal – to ensure that when markets evolve, Members are prepared not just to adapt, but to lead.
“When you bring talented people together to learn from one another, something powerful happens. The entire community gets stronger,” explains Schwartzman.
What ‘Member-driven’ looks like in practice
In a world where novelty can masquerade as progress, we choose to build for endurance. That means tools shaped by genuine use-cases, analytics that illuminate decisions rather than overwhelm them, and workflows that reduce friction rather than repackage it. Our agency model sharpens that focus. We succeed when our Members do, which keeps us aligned on the outcomes that matter: access to quality liquidity and efficiency in how trading supports the investment mandate.
Crucially, we maintain tight feedback loops across Labs, Headway, and Gateway. Ideas tested with Members in Labs inform our product roadmap. Themes debated in our Headway often translate into enhancements that change desk behaviour. Skills developed in Gateway accelerate adoption and raise the baseline across firms. The compounding effect is a community that learns together and moves faster.
As Govoni asserts: “Trust is earned one decision at a time. The fact our Members continue to bring us their most complex challenges is the clearest validation of our model.”
The next 25 years
The challenges ahead are not small: liquidity under varying regimes, a deluge of data, the promise and hype of AI, and a regulatory landscape that rightly demands transparency and control. None of this will be solved by any single firm or feature. But a Member community that builds together can keep making the market meaningfully better.
That is our commitment as we enter our next chapter: keep Labs at the front of our innovation engine; keep investing in people through Headway and Gateway; keep measuring ourselves by the confidence we give our Members at the moment of execution and by the trust we sustain over years.
Community has always been our catalyst. It remains our greatest advantage. And it is why we believe the most important innovations we’ll deliver are still ahead of us.