There is a pattern in how new infrastructure technologies get adopted in financial services. The early movers experiment quietly. A second wave notices what the first wave built and moves quickly to catch up. By the time broad adoption is underway, the firms that moved first have already embedded the infrastructure into their operations, and that advantage compounds.

This pattern played out with electronic trading in the 1990s, with cloud infrastructure in the 2010s, and with data analytics platforms throughout the last decade. Each time, the firms that waited for certainty before acting paid a significant cost — not just in capability, but in the relationships and network effects that accumulated around early adopters.

MCP is at a similar inflection point right now.

The Protocol Has Already Won

MCP was introduced by Anthropic in November 2024. By March 2025, OpenAI had officially adopted it. Google DeepMind followed. By December 2025, Anthropic donated the protocol to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation — a signal that MCP was no longer a proprietary bet but a shared standard. As of April 2026, there are over 10,000 public MCP servers and the Python SDK alone records 164 million monthly downloads.

The debate about whether MCP will become the standard protocol for AI-to-tool communication is effectively over. It has. The more relevant question now is which firms in financial services are building on top of it — and which are waiting.

What "Being MCP-Ready" Actually Means

Being MCP-ready is not about having a technology team experiment with a new protocol. It is about having made a decision: that your firm's data, your systems, and your deal flow will be accessible to AI agents — your own and, where appropriate, your partners' — in a structured, standardised, and governed way.

This decision has real downstream implications. If your infrastructure is MCP-accessible, a partner's AI agent can query your inventory directly. A client's AI assistant can pull information about their holdings without requiring a portal login. Your own internal agents can coordinate across systems without requiring human intermediation at every step. The firm becomes, in a meaningful sense, AI-accessible by design.

If your infrastructure is not MCP-accessible, those same interactions continue to go through manual channels. Relationship managers relay information by message. Analysts pull reports by hand. The AI the firm deploys operates in isolation from the data that would make it genuinely useful.

The Private Markets Case

In private markets specifically, the case for MCP infrastructure is reinforced by the structural information problem we explored in our previous post. Deal flow is fragmented. Terms are informal. Coordination is slow. If a firm builds a proprietary MCP server that structures its deal intelligence and makes it accessible to AI agents, the result is not just operational efficiency — it is a fundamentally different information advantage.

Partners who connect to that infrastructure can access live deal data through their own AI agents. The firm that built the infrastructure becomes the node that others route through. Network effects accrue to early movers.

Why Now Is the Moment

The technology is mature enough to build on. The standard is settled. The gap between where most financial firms are — AI as a productivity tool for internal workflows — and where the frontier is — AI as an operational layer that connects firms, partners, and clients — is still wide enough that first movers have a real advantage.

In twelve months, firms that have not started building MCP infrastructure will be building it reactively, under pressure, to catch up with counterparties who are already operating on it. That is a harder position to build from.

We have been building for exactly this moment. What we have built positions EVIDENT as one of the first, if not the first, investment management firm to publish its own MCP. We will share the details shortly.

--

 DISCLAIMER

The information provided is for informational and analytical purposes only and should not be construed as financial advice or an offer or an invitation to buy or sell any securities or related financial instruments. It does not constitute a solicitation, recommendation, or endorsement of any particular security, investment product, or strategy. Investors should seek professional advice of their own before making any investment decisions. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of EVIDENT or its affiliates. Readers should independently verify any claims and seek appropriate professional advice before making decisions. For Professional Investors only, as defined under Cap.571 Securities and Futures Ordinance in the laws of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China.‍‍