Ten years ago, Forefront set out with a simple goal: become the go-to marketing and communications partner for the industry’s most ambitious fintech and capital markets firms.
That commitment never wavers — but what it looks like in practice can vary greatly. A founder launching out of stealth mode needs something very different from a firm that’s already spent two decades establishing its reputation. We’ve helped clients achieve their goals in both situations — and in every situation in between.
As part of our ongoing 10th anniversary celebration, we’re looking back at some of the client success stories that best illustrate that range.
For Startups: Building the Story From Day One
The earliest-stage work is often the highest-stakes. There’s no existing brand to sharpen, no track record to lean on — just a vision, and the challenge of making that vision legible to a skeptical market.
Talos is one of the clearest examples of what that can lead to. The firm launched in stealth mode with an ambitious premise: institutional-grade infrastructure that would let traditional finance take digital assets seriously. We built the brand around a “building blocks” idea — Talos not as a flashy front end, but as the structural foundation institutions could build on. The positioning held up: within 18 months of launch, Talos raised a Series A at a $1.26 billion valuation.
Hidden Road followed a similar arc in the same space. We built its brand from the ground up, with the firm outsourcing its marketing function to us entirely. Like Talos, Hidden Road went on to a blockbuster outcome — an acquisition by digital asset infrastructure provider Ripple in 2025 for 1.25 billion.
Crossover Markets faced a tighter timeline. The firm was introducing CROSSx, the first execution-only crypto ECN built for institutions, without a website or brand presence of any kind. We moved fast — building messaging around Crossover’s speed and institutional focus, then standing up a full brand and launch campaign on a condensed schedule. The payoff was launch coverage in Bloomberg, CoinDesk and Traders Magazine, right out of the gate.
MayStreet started somewhere different: a little-known market data provider trying to compete in the shadow of Bloomberg and Refinitiv. Rather than a single launch moment, this was a multi-year build — three years of outsourced brand, design, PR and content work that tripled the firm’s top-line revenue and repositioned it as a serious institutional competitor. That trajectory ended in acquisition by the London Stock Exchange Group in 2022.
For Scaleups: Sharpening the Story as the Market Gets Crowded
Once a company has traction, the challenge changes. It’s not about being noticed — it’s about standing out as competitors catch up and the story needs to carry more weight.
Broadway came to us mid-transition, having just divested its non-fixed-income business and needing an identity to match its new direction. We built the repositioning around a simple idea — that technology should amplify human expertise, not replace it — landing on the tagline “Where Tech Meets Intellect” and simplifying the name from “Broadway Technology” to just “Broadway.” Eighteen months after the relaunch, Broadway was acquired by Bloomberg.
LiquidityBook has a longer history with us than any other client — it was our very first. What started as a brand build became a nearly decade-long partnership, with Forefront serving as LiquidityBook’s embedded marketing team through years of growth. That run culminated in an acquisition by FactSet for $246 million in early 2025, a fitting bookend to where the relationship began.
DASH Financial Technologies launched into a market dominated by bulge-bracket brokers, carving out space as a transparency-first alternative. We built the brand around that differentiator, elevated its leadership as industry thought leaders, and supported five straight years of double-digit revenue growth — a run that ended in a successful sale to ION in 2021.
Trumid took on entrenched incumbents in a different corner of the market, positioning itself as the disruptor challenging traditional bond-trading players. And on the philanthropic side, Wall Street Rides FAR has been a scaleup story of its own — years of pro bono PR and content work that helped the autism research charity ride quadruple its annual donations to over $1 million.
For Standouts: Sharpening Brands That Were Already Winning
Not every client needs to build a reputation from scratch. Some of our most interesting work has been with firms that were already industry leaders, but needed their public identity to catch up to their scale.
Tower Research Capital is a good example. The firm had long been a powerhouse in quantitative trading, but its public profile hadn’t kept pace — a liability as competition for engineering and trading talent intensified. We built the “Many Teams, One Home” platform to capture Tower’s collaborative culture, and we still manage that brand today.
Trillium, a well-established proprietary trading firm, had a similar gap: an energetic internal culture that its public brand didn’t reflect, at a moment when the firm needed to recruit top undergraduate talent. A new recruiting-focused site and narrative more than tripled its annual college applicant pool within two years.
At the largest end of the spectrum, we’ve also done the kind of bespoke, high-stakes project work that comes with serving established industry giants: strategic go-to-market planning for major product launches at S&P Global Market Intelligence and Kroll, messaging and communications support to help Broadridge integrate its multi-billion-dollar acquisition of Itiviti, and front-office product packaging and positioning work for FactSet.
Closing Thought
This article highlights some of our proudest moments, but our range extends further than any single list can capture. Over ten years, we’ve built go-to-market strategy for major product launches, guided clients through multi-billion-dollar acquisition integrations and maintained longstanding relationships with organizations like the Security Traders Association (STA) and the Securities Information Processors (SIPs) — chosen, in both cases, for our depth of market structure expertise. It adds up to a decade of work across nearly every corner of capital markets and fintech.
Ten years and hundreds of clients later, the common thread isn’t company size. It’s partnership. Whether we’re building a brand from nothing or sharpening one that’s already working, the job is the same: understanding what makes a company matter, and telling that story clearly enough that it sticks. Here’s to the next decade.