The public markets are shrinking, but private capital is booming, and Luxembourg is quietly building the exchange of the future.
There was a time when every ambitious entrepreneur dreamed of ringing the bell at a stock exchange. The IPO was a coming-of-age ritual, the moment when a company’s private ambitions turned public. That era is fading fast.
Today, fewer firms take that step. Why would they? The scrutiny is relentless, the costs enormous, and the rewards uncertain. Instead, the world’s growth capital now flows through private channels, funds, secondaries, and buyouts that would once have been unimaginable in size. Deals above ten billion euros barely raise an eyebrow.
What’s dying isn’t capitalism itself, but its public stage. The energy has shifted behind the curtain, into the quieter rooms of private equity, private debt, and venture capital. And if you follow those flows, you’ll find that many of the pipes now converge in a small European country better known for its discretion than its drama: Luxembourg.
Here, the foundations of a new marketplace already exist. Fund administrators, AIFMs, depositaries, and regulators have built an ecosystem that can handle global capital with quiet precision. The next frontier is to turn that infrastructure into something bigger, a genuine marketplace for private assets where GP-led and LP-led secondaries, and even primaries, can trade with transparency and trust.
Technology will decide whether this happens. A new generation of fund administrators is using artificial intelligence and large language models to tame the chaos of unstructured data, transforming thousands of pages of legal and financial documents into clean, actionable insight. What once took weeks of manual work can now happen in minutes. That changes everything.
I don’t believe Luxembourg needs to copy Wall Street. It can build something better suited for the age we’re entering, a market that prizes information, not speculation; relationships, not algorithms. The IPO may be dying, but private markets are alive, and if Luxembourg plays its cards right, it could well become their beating heart.
Christophe Santer is a columnist for Investment Officer Luxembourg. A Luxembourg native, Santer has nearly two decades of experience in fund administration, investor services, and private markets. He also works as director of business development manager at bunch.