Coase Inversion
75 vendors sit at the centre. They capture 90.8% of global financial institutions.
90.8%
Institutions in shared vendor mesh
75
Vendors carrying the mesh
52.8%
Bilateral pairs sharing a vendor
In a population of 543 regulated financial institutions, 90.8 percent share a common vendor substrate. Seventy-five firms carry that substrate. The risk perimeter no longer ends at the institutional boundary; it ends at the vendors that span it.
Figure 1 · The Coase Inversion
Each circle on the left is a named vendor anchor sized by the number of institutions that depend on it. Each dot on the right is an institution drawn from the population of 543. Hairlines record the dependency. Eight named vendors carry visible mesh, and a further sixty-seven sit beneath, connecting the rest. The structural reading is plain: institutional boundaries no longer contain the surface they were built to contain.
Source · Meridian substrate v13.1.0, May 2026 · Vendor labels anonymised per disclosure protocol
Methodology · SSRN 6470098
66 countries · 12 sectors · 95,876 agents · 626,390 governance edges