Twenty one questions for the IDBX chairman, printed as they were given, including the two he would rather had not come up. Why he left thirty years in this market, who should own a venue like this, and the part that does IDBX no favours.
Published in The Engine Room on 31 August 2026 and reproduced here in full. Nicholas J Runcorn was asked twenty one questions. The answers are printed as they were given.
I stopped waiting for somebody else to do it. That is the whole of it. I am building the venue I spent that career wishing existed, and at some point the waiting becomes its own decision.
It is not a London project either. The interbank market is global, and the charges we are talking about are paid in every timezone that trades.
An institution pays for one trade four separate times. The brokerage fee. The settlement chain behind it. The reconciliation work nobody invoices but everybody staffs. Then the data, sold back to the desks that created it. Only the first of those is ever negotiated, and it is rarely the largest.
None of that is anybody's villainy. It accumulated. Every layer solved a real problem at the time and nobody was ever asked to remove one. That is how markets get heavy.
Two institutions who already know they want to trade with each other should not need this many people standing between them. Leaner means fewer intermediaries in the middle of a decision that has already been made, fewer staff reconciling records that should have agreed in the first place, and a cost base that does not scale with the number of tickets you print.
Lean is not a cost-cutting slogan. It is a design constraint. Every layer you leave in has to justify itself to somebody, and mostly nobody asks.
Completely. I have been the person who would have had to answer for the system. You design differently once you have sat on that side of the table. Governance stops being something you add at the end to satisfy someone, and becomes the thing you draw first.
AIDANN is a supervised reasoning layer embedded in trading workflows, not an autonomous trading engine. It is a trade assistant. It sees everything on the platform and it holds no permission to trade any of it. It answers, proposes and computes. It does not place, amend or cancel, and it does not touch settlement.
It is one, and it is mine. I drew the perimeter before we built the mind. An assistant that cannot execute is the only kind I would put in front of a regulator, and the only kind I would want on my own desk.
One venue for both. A tokenised bond is still a bond. The obligation does not change because the record keeping did.
What worries me is an industry building a second market beside the first, with its own liquidity, its own rules and its own settlement, and calling that progress. Fragmenting a market is not modernising it. IDBX is designed so tokenised and traditional instruments trade on the same rail, into the same settlement, under the same governance. If the tokenised version of an asset needs its own venue, somebody has failed.
The institutions that use it. That is not a slogan, it is the only structure in which neutrality is real. A venue owned by outside shareholders has one duty and it is not to the desks trading on it. Sooner or later those two pull in opposite directions, and you can guess which one wins.
So we are building this for the global interbank market, and we are looking to partner with some of the largest banks in the world with the intention that they own it. Neutrality you have to take on trust is not neutrality. Neutrality you can read in a share register is.
Enormously, and it matters most at the start. The early partners decide what this becomes. Choosing them wisely is the most consequential thing anybody does in a venture like this, and it is a decision most people make on availability rather than on fit.
What I am looking for is institutions that embrace the vision rather than examine it from a safe distance. Partners who add real value and commit fully, not partially and not conditionally. A handful of those is worth more than a long list of logos on a slide, and it is worth waiting for.
I would rather move slower with the right people than quickly with people who are hedging.
They have, and mostly they had to choose. Cheaper or smarter. Faster or safer. The technology did not exist to have all of it at once, so every previous attempt picked two and lived with the third.
That is no longer true. There has never been a greater opportunity to bring modern technology into this market and come out with something genuinely smarter, more efficient and materially cheaper across the interbank markets, all three at the same time. What is also different now is that you can build the thing and let people test it before anybody signs anything. That was not available to the last generation who tried this, and it changes what you are allowed to promise.
Global, and I am not going to be coy about it. The interbank market is the plumbing underneath every price the rest of the world eventually sees. Make that layer cheaper and cleaner and the effect does not stay in the interbank market. It comes out of the other end in what everybody pays.
I have no interest in building a boutique alternative that a handful of desks use for a handful of products.
Either this becomes a way the market genuinely clears, or we have not finished.
It is. Write it down and hold me to it. That is precisely why I am saying it in public rather than in a room.
I would rather be measured against something worth attempting and fall short of it than hit a target I set low enough to be safe. The market will judge which of those I have done, and it will not need my permission.
Guts, and a tenacious appetite that does not switch off. Putting yourself on the front line as an entrepreneur takes both, and without them you stand still.
Standing still is the comfortable option and it is available to everybody in this industry. Most people take it and I understand exactly why. The alternative means being wrong in public, repeatedly, and spending years on something that does not exist yet while people who took the safe route are perfectly pleasant to you about it.
I would not go back. Comfortable was the least useful I have ever been.
They are already paying for all of it. Every charge we have discussed is passed down the chain and ends up in a fund's cost base and eventually in somebody's pension. The buy side never sees the invoice. It settles it.
So they are not a later phase we might get around to. They are the reason the arithmetic matters at all. Get the interbank layer right and the saving does not stop at the dealer, and if it does stop there then we have built something considerably less useful than we set out to.
Because I would rather understand something than approve it. If I cannot build a thing, I cannot judge it, and a chairman signing off work he does not understand is how organisations end up expensive and vague at the same time.
It is also the lean argument applied to myself. I am not going to ask a market to strip out layers it does not need while carrying a stack of my own.
Because claims are cheap and everybody in this industry makes them. The moment a reader finds one thing you did not have to admit, the rest of the page starts working. Leave the inconvenient part out and you have written an advertisement, and nobody has changed their mind because of an advertisement in a very long time.
IDBX is not live. It is in build. Our FCA authorisation is in preparation, not granted, and I will not have that softened by anybody.
They should not, on my word. What is real is the engine. It runs, in a browser, today. Go and press it, then decide.
That is the difference I care about. A slide asks you to believe something. A working system invites you to try to break it. We would rather be tested than admired.
I am not in a hurry to be live. I am in a hurry to be right. Those look like the same thing from outside and they are not, and the gap between them is where most of the damage in this industry has been done.
The process exists because somebody, somewhere, already learned the lesson the hard way. I would rather embrace it and come out of the other side with something a bank can actually connect to.
This is the beginning of it, not the end. The market is changing faster now than at any point in my thirty years, and AI is the largest part of that. It will be implemented everywhere, and quickly, and that is exactly why it has to be done in a controlled way with somebody accountable for it. Speed without control is how markets break.
Somebody has to hold the line on what these systems are permitted to do, and I would rather that line were drawn by people who have had to answer for a system than by people who have only ever built one.
Not that I was right. That I was checkable.
The engine computes. AIDANN describes. Nothing is generated.