Walk through the landscape of modern institutional investing and the names begin to blur together. They are short. Abstract. Vaguely European. Carefully meaningless.
Ardian. Epiris. Alkeon. Coatue.
These names scream AI. But the bots are not strictly to blame for this kind of financial naming style. The forces driving it – notably globalization, regulations, and trademark law – have compressed naming into a road so narrow that humans and machines now reliably arrive at the same destination (though the human versions are generally more musical).
The End of Expressive Naming in Finance
For most of financial history, investment firms were named after people, places, or metaphors: Goldman Sachs. Morgan Stanley. BlackRock. Bridgewater.
These names carried identity and narrative. They reflected a period when firms were founder-led, nationally rooted, and only lightly exposed to international regulation, sanction lists, and Google autocomplete.
That world no longer exists.
Today’s institutional investment firms raise capital across jurisdictions, scripts, and legal regimes. Their names must function equally well in a Singaporean prospectus, a Swiss regulatory filing, and a Middle Eastern sovereign allocation memo – preferably without prompting a follow-up question.
Personality does not scale globally. Neutrality does.
If modern financial brands were a color, they’d be beige. Not chic, curated Insta-beige but the safe, low-volatility shade left after every other option has been stress-tested and discarded.
These “beige names” are optimized to avoid objection or risk: they are abstract, semantically thin, narratively empty. AI-ish, pattern-familiar, emotionally flat. But it is the kind of naming style our financial clients have been requesting. In fact, one could safely posit that at least in this industry, beige is the new black.
Why Everything Now Sounds AI-Generated
AI doesn’t invent names out of nowhere; it extrapolates from patterns that have already proven successful. So when AI generates financial brand names that feel “institutional,” it’s not applying its own aesthetic. It’s reflecting the prevailing preferences encoded in its training data – preferences shaped by qualities like global pronounceability, emotional neutrality, and linguistic simplicity.
This typically results in names that are two to three syllables long, composed of soft consonants and ambiguous vowels, and notably lacking any clear semantic anchor or narrative.
The goal isn’t to be memorable. The goal is to avoid objection.
The Trademark Trap: Why Real Words Are Almost Unusable
There is another decisive force shaping modern financial naming: trademark law.
In Class 36 – the trademark category covering financial services, insurance, and real estate – actual and plausible English words are brutally difficult to protect. The category has been strip-mined for decades.
If a useable term exists in nature, the galaxy, architecture, mythology, military history, and just about any other field of knowledge, a financial company or product has already claimed it.
Even when registrable, real words tend to be fragile marks today. They are often very diluted (used in many combinations such as Red Point, Red Hill, and Red Stone), expensive to defend, and one cease-and-desist letter away from a headache. For firms deploying billions, “theoretically enforceable” is not a comforting standard.
Invented words, by contrast, begin life as inherently distinctive. They are by no means a foregone conclusion, but they are easier to ring-fence against a wide range of potential issues.
But as in life, solving one problem creates another.
Too Many Made-Up Names, Too Close Together
Names do not need to be identical to trigger a Section 2(d) likelihood-of-confusion refusal. Phonetic similarity alone can suffice.
That logically leads to this question: if every financial firm is seeking to register a name in this newer, institutional style – two or three syllables, soft consonants, ambiguous vowels – (what we at River + Wolf call “balloon vowels”) and the absence of any clear semantic anchor – won’t many of these phonetically similar names end up too close for comfort?
Absolutely.
The slightly better news is that, because Class 36 is one of the most congested categories in the trademark system, examiners can sometimes be more tolerant of phonetic overlap. That said, it’s a roll of the dice, because what helps also hurts.
An excessively crowded register has produced massive examiner backlogs. This situation can tempt an overworked PTO attorney to replace a more time-consuming, nuanced analysis with one largely focused on phonetic similarity between marks.
Given this, invented or fanciful words are not a surefire way to dodge trademark scrutiny. Once upon a time – maybe. Less so today. They are simply the least rocky of the rocky roads available.
How IP Attorneys Actually Handle This
But, as described in an earlier piece, a Section 2 (d) refusal is not the end of the road. Trademark attorneys have a variety of tools to overturn such a refusal. Here are a few:
1. Marketplace sophistication. Investment firms do not sell sneakers. Their audiences are institutional buyers engaged in months of diligence, advised by lawyers and consultants. Trademark law recognizes that sophisticated purchasers and high-dollar transactions can materially reduce the likelihood of confusion.
2. Overall commercial impression. Marks are evaluated holistically. Attorneys emphasize differences in spelling, cadence, stress, and visual presentation – distinctions that become decisive in crowded fields.
3. Congestion itself. As mentioned previously, density cuts both ways. In saturated markets, consumers are conditioned to parse fine distinctions, and no single sound or suffix dominates. Attorneys often point to similar third-party marks peacefully coexisting on the register.
4. Narrowing the services. Where needed, counsel narrow the services description – “private equity fund management” rather than “financial services” – to avoid unnecessary overlap with adjacent industries.
5. Coexistence agreements. When appropriate, firms negotiate consent or coexistence agreements. Among institutional players, this is routine, discreet, and can be far cheaper than litigating hypothetical confusion.
Why Firms Accept the Risk Anyway
Despite phonetic crowding and legal friction, invented names remain the dominant choice because the alternatives are worse. Real words are overused and hard to enforce. Expressive names might not travel as well globally. Founder names can age badly.
For these and other reasons, abstract coinages offer the best balance of desired goals: global neutrality, potentially stronger trademark strength, and long-term flexibility.
And while these kinds of names are sonically clustered, creative visuals, plus legal tools and allocator psychology have evolved to help them survive in a system that rewards convergence, and quietly punishes deviation.
The Real Paradox
Today, if a modern investment firm’s name does not sound AI-generated, it usually means it violates one of the system’s constraints: too expressive, too narrative, too real. For this reason, the tonal and structural convergence we are seeing today between AI and human-generated financial names is not a coincidence. It is the visible edge of a system that has been optimized for neutrality over expression.
In short, unlike some other brands, modern investment firm names are not meant to be loved. They are affairs of the head, not the heart.
The goal of such names is to exist in a safe, carefully managed state of ambiguity – quietly distinctive, globally generic, carefully meaningless.
That is not a branding failure. It is the system working exactly as designed.
Still, like all names, these must be thoughtfully and artfully constructed. And that’s a sweet spot at River + Wolf. So if you find yourself in need a financial name that checks all the boxes while still sounding appealing, get in touch. We would love to help.
