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Private markets are not a field where the work that matters can be assembled from interchangeable parts. Structuring a tokenised security, navigating a regulatory framework with limited precedent, advising a counterparty through a decision that has no established template — none of this transfers cleanly through process or documentation. It accumulates through practice. And it travels with the people who hold it.
That conviction is the reason EVIDENT and Ben McQuhae & Co are joining forces.
The combination is best understood as a deliberate reconfiguration of how EVIDENT operates, not as an appointment. Ben McQuhae & Co has advised EVIDENT as external counsel across a number of transactions over several years. That work produced something more durable than completed mandates: a shared understanding of the firm, its counterparties, and the market it operates in. We are now bringing the structure into line with that reality.
Ben McQuhae joins as Chief Business Officer and Head of Transactions, responsible for the execution of EVIDENT's investment transactions. Jessica Ha joins from the BMQ team to help lead EVIDENT Arc, a new advisory practice. As part of the combination, BMQ will act exclusively for EVIDENT and EVIDENT Arc going forward.
"Full-stack" is used loosely across financial services. At EVIDENT it has a precise meaning: we operate the entire chain of a private markets transaction inside one licensed institution.
We originate the assets. We structure them, which includes tokenisation where it serves a purpose. We commit our own capital as a principal, and our partners and investors co-invest alongside us. Through a separately licensed entity, we run the full administration layer — fund administration, accounting, reporting, and transfer agency — the parts of private markets that remain, for most of the industry, genuinely broken. We built that capability on a greenfield. And we handle distribution end to end: primary placement as a licensed broker-dealer, and a secondary market in the same assets, which is where liquidity is engineered. The technology and the market infrastructure underneath all of it are our own, not rented.
This is not vertical integration for its own sake. Owning the full chain is what lets us deploy the two technologies remaking this industry coherently rather than partially. Blockchain becomes a genuine system of record — every position, transfer, and capital movement settled on a shared ledger, because we control the rails they settle on. AI becomes a system of orchestration across the whole operation, because there is a whole operation to orchestrate, not a series of handoffs between outside providers. A firm that owns one or two links in the chain can bolt these technologies onto a process. A firm that owns the chain can rebuild the process around them.
There is a part of the stack that rarely appears in the operational diagram, and it is the one that matters most at this moment in the market's development: the legal and regulatory architecture beneath everything else.
In a market still writing its own rules — where digital market infrastructure, agentic systems, and evolving regulation are arriving at once — the easy instinct is to treat law and regulation as a constraint on innovation, a brake to be managed. We see it the other way around. In regulated capital markets, you can only innovate by knowing the rules. The edge of what is possible is defined by the framework, and the firms that can find that edge are the ones who understand the framework deeply enough to know exactly where it sits.
This becomes more important, not less, as technology accelerates. As AI compresses the pace at which new structures can be designed and brought to market, the binding constraint stops being whether something can be built. It becomes whether it can be built within the rules, at the frontier, without crossing a line that is often unmarked. That judgement does not come from software. It comes from practitioners who have spent careers at the intersection of transaction structuring, legal architecture, and regulatory positioning.
Bringing that capability inside is the building block this phase of EVIDENT required. It completes the stack with the layer that holds the rest of it together.
Ben brings more than 25 years across transactions, corporate finance, M&A, and project development in Asia and internationally, spanning private equity, carbon markets, and infrastructure. A former partner at Jones Day and the founder of Ben McQuhae & Co, which advised on several of the region's landmark digital private markets transactions, he is also a co-founder of the Hong Kong Green Finance Association and Hong Kong's representative to the UN's Financial Centres for Sustainability network.
What makes the fit precise is the combination he carries in one person: transactional depth, an entrepreneur's instinct for where the market is moving, and a practitioner's read on how technology is remaking capital markets — grounded in transaction reality, not theory. That is exactly the profile this next phase calls for.
The launch of EVIDENT Arc extends the same logic outward. Arc works alongside partners on the questions that sit at the frontier of modern capital markets: digital market infrastructure, agentic systems, and the legal and regulatory architecture that governs both. Jessica Ha helps lead the practice from its inception.
Arc formalises an advisory capability that has been developing in practice. Further detail on its mandate and scope will follow shortly.
The combination of EVIDENT and Ben McQuhae & Co is one data point in a wider pattern. As private markets mature and the infrastructure beneath them grows more sophisticated, the organisations best positioned to lead will be those that have resolved the old tension between platform and firm — that operate not as technology providers holding advisory relationships at arm's length, but as integrated institutions with the full transaction chain, and the judgement that governs it, inside.
Our move in this direction is deliberate. It is the kind of structural decision that looks obvious in retrospect, and that matters precisely because it is made before it becomes obvious.
