A zoomed-out look at how money and risk move through the economy, how the major sectors interlock, and exactly where Osmosis sits inside the machine.
Strip away the jargon and you get three jobs:
Turn today’s savings into tomorrow’s spending, investing, or retirement. Mortgages, pensions, CDs, annuities—different flavors of the same job.
Send capital from folks who have it (savers, allocators) to those who need it (companies, governments, households). Banks, funds, and fintech pipes make it possible.
Decide who bears credit, market, longevity, or catastrophe risk—and what that risk costs. Insurance, hedging, securitization are all risk-pricing tools.
Every institution we sell to is just a different way of doing one (or more) of these three things.
Think of finance as pipes connecting four groups. Cash and information circulate continuously.
We sit inside the information layer between the institutional savers (allocators) and the asset managers courting them. The finance map is huge; we focus on the corridor where allocator voices drive fundraising.
Finance is the whole universe: lending, payments, insurance, markets, regulation, treasury teams at industrial companies.
Capital markets are the channel where long-term funding gets raised and traded via securities (debt, equity, structured products). It’s where issuers meet investors.
The Capital Markets 101 deck zoomed in on one corridor (allocators → asset managers). Finance 101 zooms out to the whole city map.
We sell to the allocator ↔ asset manager corridor, but prospects expect us to understand how the rest of finance feeds into their world.
Nine sectors cover 99% of the “I work in finance” world.
| Sector | Core Job | How They Make Money | Primary Customers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retail & Commercial Banking | Take deposits, make loans, run payments | Net interest margin + fees | Households, SMEs, corporates |
| Investment Banking & Capital Markets | Advise/underwrite deals, trade securities | Advisory & underwriting fees, trading spreads | Corporates, governments, PE/VC sponsors |
| Asset & Wealth Management | Invest on behalf of others | Management + performance fees on AUM | Retail investors, HNW, pensions, endowments |
| Insurance & Reinsurance | Absorb specific risks for premiums | Underwriting margin + investment income | Individuals, corporates, other insurers |
| Specialty Lending / Private Credit | Lend outside traditional bank balance sheets | Interest + fees, occasional equity upside | Middle-market corporates, sponsors |
| Payments, Cards & Fintech | Move money and power commerce | Interchange, processing, SaaS fees | Merchants, consumers, platforms |
| Market Infrastructure & Data | Operate the rails (exchanges, custody, intel) | Transaction fees, data subscriptions, licenses | All financial institutions |
| Public Sector & Regulation | Set rules, backstop crises, manage currency | Not profit-driven; policy mandates | Banks, markets, broader economy |
| Corporate Finance (Non-Financials) | Optimize capital inside real-economy firms | Support function, not revenue line | The business itself + external financiers |
Deposit money from individuals and companies, extend loans (mortgages, cards, auto, SME), and run services like payments, FX, and trade finance.
These teams aren’t our buyers, but they recycle deposits into capital that later gets allocated into asset managers.
The sell-side bridge between issuers and investors.
M&A, restructurings, fairness opinions. Paid when deals close.
Price and distribute IPOs, follow-ons, bond deals, leveraged loans.
Sales & trading, derivatives structuring, research, prime brokerage.
These teams interface daily with asset managers and allocators. They’re not buyers, but they influence what LPs see and when issuers hit the market.
Take capital from allocators/investors → invest across asset classes → charge management & performance fees.
Pensions, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, insurers, family offices.
Hedge funds, mutuals, PE/VC, private credit, infrastructure, real estate.
Private banks, wirehouses, RIAs distributing products to individuals.
Fundraising is existential. More AUM = more management fees. Osmosis tells capital formation teams who is allocating, what they said, and when to call—turning allocator speech into real-time dealflow.
Take on life, health, property/casualty, or specialty risks. Pool and price them, then invest the float (premiums collected but not yet paid out).
Large insurers double as allocators—they run massive portfolios and allocate to external managers across private credit, PE, infra, and real estate.
Credit intermediation outside regulated bank balance sheets.
Direct lending to middle-market companies, mezzanine finance, asset-backed lending, factoring, leasing, distressed/special sits.
Banks are capital-constrained; companies still need leverage. Institutional allocators fund private credit vehicles willing to take complexity + illiquidity.
Higher yields and origination fees than bank loans, sometimes equity-like kickers. Hot category for pensions/insurers.
Private credit managers are constantly fundraising and hyper-sensitive to allocator pacing changes. Osmosis alerts them when LPs talk about upping (or pausing) credit allocations.
They run the plumbing of money movement.
Visa, Mastercard, AmEx, FIS, Fiserv, Adyen, Stripe. Earn interchange + processing fees.
Cash App, PayPal, Apple Pay, Revolut. Monetize interchange, lending spreads, subscriptions.
Affirm, Klarna, Shopify Capital. Blend lending economics with software distribution.
Mostly outside allocator/GP fundraising, but these firms are issuers tapping capital markets and investment opportunities that our customers cover.
Operate trading venues for equities, bonds, derivatives. Charge transaction + listing fees.
Manage counterparty risk, ensure trades close, safeguard assets.
Traditional platforms (Preqin, PitchBook, eVestment, Burgiss) are libraries of historical commitments and fund attributes.
We don’t store last year’s allocations—we capture live spoken conversations (IC meetings, board meetings, CIO interviews) and turn them into real-time allocator signals.
Fed, ECB, BOE, etc. Set monetary policy, act as lender of last resort, oversee bank balance sheets.
SEC, CFTC, national prudential regulators. Police disclosure, conduct, leverage.
Treasury/finance ministries manage fiscal policy and sovereign debt issuance.
Many allocator decisions play out in public forums because of disclosure rules. Those recordings are exactly the content Osmosis monitors.
Outside Wall Street, “finance” usually means internal teams keeping the lights on.
Cash, liquidity, FX, funding, bank relationships.
Budgeting, forecasting, variance analysis.
M&A, partnerships, strategic investments.
Communicate with public shareholders and analysts.
These teams are clients of the broader financial system. Their capital-raising, hedging, or M&A decisions create the deals that asset managers invest in.
Investment banking, sales & trading, research, prime brokerage. Paid by issuers and investors for advice and execution.
Asset managers, hedge funds, PE/VC, private credit. Paid via management and performance fees from allocators.
Retail & commercial banking, corporate lending, specialty finance. Metrics revolve around loan growth and net interest margin.
Underwriting, actuarial, investment teams at insurers. Focused on combined ratio and ROE.
Exchanges, data providers, fintech infrastructure, regtech.
Risk, compliance, ops, finance, technology—the control layer.
We target the buy-side—specifically IR/capital formation and PM teams charged with raising and deploying capital.
There are two sets of pipes in finance. One moves cash; the other moves intelligence.
Structured, slow, backward-looking.
This is where decisions are actually made—spoken first, documented later.
We turn the informal spoken layer into a structured, searchable, personalized alert stream. Databases = library, Osmosis = radar.
Monitor public allocator meetings in real time → extract who/what/how much → push speaker-attributed alerts and watchlists to IR, capital formation, and PM teams.
Osmosis is the real-time allocator intelligence layer for the buy-side—telling managers who is buying, what they said, and how to reach them before anyone else.
Anchor the value in simple fee math.
Osmosis costs a fraction of one mandate. Customers attribute specific nine-figure wins to alerts and see 3–4× higher presentation hit rates vs. the ~5% industry norm.
Finance is gigantic in dollar terms; we occupy a tiny but leveraged node: who gets into allocator conversations first.
Add-ons to the GP/LP/AUM glossary from Capital Markets 101.
| Sell-Side | Banks/brokers selling securities & services to issuers/investors. |
| Buy-Side | Asset managers investing on behalf of clients. |
| Primary vs. Secondary | New issuance vs. trading existing securities. |
| Net Interest Margin (NIM) | Lenders’ spread: loan yields − funding costs. |
| Float | Premiums/funds held before payout that can be invested. |
| Shadow Banking | Credit intermediation outside regulated banks. |
| Allocator | Institution deciding where to place large pools of capital. |
| Mandate | Commitment (e.g., $150M) from an allocator to a manager. |
| Pacing | Speed/size at which allocators commit to strategies over time. |
| OCIO | Outsourced CIO managing an allocator’s portfolio with discretion. |
| IR / Capital Formation | Teams at asset managers responsible for raising and retaining capital. |
| Information Advantage | The edge you get by hearing allocator intentions before competitors—what Osmosis delivers. |