Invested Innovator
Marquette alumna leads a startup aiming to provide opportunities to invest in private placement securities
By Claire Curry
Exploring new frontiers is a common theme throughout Shari (Cummings) Noonan’s life, from her years at Marquette through her 25-year career in the financial services industry.
Noonan, Bus Ad ’96, realized her passion for business as an undergraduate and pursued a degree in accounting with a specialization in global business.
“One of the things I found special about Marquette is that they took an interest in helping you achieve what you wanted to achieve,” she says, adding that one of her most important goals in college was to gain international experience.
To that end, Noonan spent two weeks studying abroad in Turkey as a freshman and one sophomore-year semester in France. She set out for Eastern Europe as a junior, interning with Poland’s first cell phone company, an experience she described as “fascinating and differentiating.”
“In 1995, Eastern Europe was a sort of Wild West. It was a new, exciting and very different kind of place,” she says. “I thought that delivering this new technology there was going to be quite a game-changer.”
New York City became the next frontier for the Kansas City native when Noonan joined KPMG as a consultant. She managed process and conversion projects for the Big Four accounting firm and earned an MBA at Columbia Business School.
Then, in 1999 she found herself on the leading edge of another venture when she joined one of the first electronic trading companies that ultimately revolutionized Wall Street.
“It was right when things were moving away from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to electronic,” she says. “It was such a magical time because things were moving so quickly, and the industry was changing so rapidly.”
In the early 2000s, Noonan brought her ever-expanding skill set to Goldman Sachs, where she helped to lead the investment bank into a new era. She successfully oversaw the integration of a newly acquired electronic trading platform throughout the entire global franchise.
These experiences led to successive leadership positions at Deutsche Bank — first as chief operating officer of electronic trading, then COO of global equity derivatives, and finally, COO of global equity trading — all culminating in 2016 with the launch of Rialto Markets, a firm Noonan co-founded with her husband, Rob, and a former colleague.
Named after the Italian bridge known to be one of the world’s first marketplaces, Rialto Markets is a broker-dealer that uses blockchain-based digital securities to simplify and streamline a private market investment process that in the past has been prohibitive for both companies and investors.
“A lot of my background and experience has been in using technology to build infrastructure around different asset classes in the public markets,” she explains. “What we’re doing is building out the infrastructure for private markets.”
Operating as an alternative trading system (ATS), Rialto Markets is an SEC- and FINRA-registered digital electronic trading system that is authorized to conduct transactions.
“Shari is focusing on what I consider to be one of the most exciting parts of the financial industry today, and that is taking equity and debt offerings of private companies and allowing those to be traded on an electronic platform,” says Dr. David Krause, director of Marquette’s AIM program and associate professor. “Rialto will also be helping to unlock private market liquidity for newly created intangible digital assets.
“This is as innovative as when she went to work for that very first company back in the late ’90s where they created the first electronic trading platform for public stocks. That was revolutionary. Now here she is, 20 years later, at the forefront of a brand-new emerging aspect of the industry.”
In the past, only a select group of wealthy people had the access and ability to invest in young, private companies, he adds. But the blockchain-based digital securities market makes it possible for a more diverse group of individual investors to participate.
Over the years, Noonan has stayed deeply connected to Marquette. She is a former college advisory board member and has supported the AIM program for many years, as a guest speaker, mentor and host to interns.
“Marquette worked with me to craft unique experiences in a way most universities would not — I did not have normal in-the-box goals,” she says. “There was always a real sense of understanding the person. I think it is so important to continue to foster that environment of curated experiential learning.”
Shari (Cummings) Noonan received the Marquette University College of Business Administration’s 2020–21 Entrepreneurial Award this spring.
