The SFpocalypse is coming!

For more than a decade I was the person at securities finance conferences who would not stop talking about retail, usually to polite nods and a slow drift towards the coffee station. This year at ISLA Lisbon, I looked up and realised I was no longer the only one. Retail had become THE conversation, and the panel’s framing was blunt: retail is now a structural source of liquidity, moving from “alternative” supply into the mainstream mix, particularly in exchange-traded funds, hard-to-borrow names and small and mid-cap pools. Not a phase, not a cyclical spike, not noise around institutional flows, but structure.

If ISLA supplied the narrative, Citadel supplied the receipts. The latest Global Market Intelligence note from Scott Rubner and his team put hard numbers behind the trend. Their read is that retail now trades like institutions. May set a cash-equity record, beating the January 2021 meme-stock peak by more than 10 per cent and running at double 2024’s average. June went higher still.

This is not 2021, and retail is no longer crowding the speculative corners. It is concentrated in the same names that drive benchmarks and institutional books. Citadel said as much explicitly: retail trading has entered a new regime, defined not by enthusiasm but by persistence and structural presence. The role player you used to bring off the bench is now a starter, and on plenty of days the leading scorer. Retail securities lending has crossed the chasm.

The trouble is that our industry has not crossed it on mindset. It remains too reactive, too cautious, too fixated on operational friction instead of structural upside. Retail is now moving faster than most incumbents can handle, and in doing so those incumbents are creating more of a bottleneck for everyone. Securities lending is leading, but the same shift is coming for repo, non-purpose lending, collateral optimisation and the lending of digital assets.

Software ate most industries it touched. AI is now eating software-as-a-service. Securities finance will not be the exception. The firms that build for where the market is going will lead. The firms that defend where it has been will spend the next cycle explaining why they are behind. That reckoning deserves a name, and I will coin one here: the SFpocalypse.

If the International Securities Lending Association is serious about futureproofing this industry, and I believe it is, this is the moment. Retail, tokenisation, AI-driven liquidity and digital assets are not separate themes. They are one story, unfolding.

The good news is that we get to choose how we meet it. At Sharegain we have been building for this future for years, on a single conviction: that retail and private investors belong in the mainstream of securities finance, not at its margins. We would welcome more of the industry building it with us.

Agreement is not preparedness. The next growth leg will not wait for anyone to catch up. If you are not ready, you will soon face your SFpocalypse.