NowCM Group CEO and Founder Robert Koller says the firm has entered into an asset purchase agreement to acquire all digital and IP assets of London-based fintech Nivaura, with clients expected to join NowCM’s approach to primary debt markets. The transaction is intended to further diversify NowCM’s client offering, by creating both operational synergies and stakeholder value in the process.
“With BondAuction recently integrating into our platform, our connection with Liquidnet and with us already being a member of Swift, we’re showing that the market is consolidating in terms of primary capital markets platforms, but differently than people expected,” says Koller. “One idea was that we all sit nicely next to each other and own different parts of the village. I think that was a bit illusionary. Another was consolidation via M&A, which we have engaged in to some extent. But what we’re seeing even more is interconnectedness. We’re seeing more that there is one portal building out, which we believe is us, and where can add additional services like Bondauction, like Liquidnet.”
Building on the established connectivity between NowCM and other firms in the digitalisation of primary bond markets, the acquisition supports NowCM’s position as a provider of bond digitalisation solutions across the primary value chain. NowCM says it will also continue on the path to provide a collaborative and central digital entry point for the creation, negotiation and management of data in the regulated, multi-party workflow of primary debt markets. The platform says it remains open for further collaboration and additional points of external connectivity will be announced in the near future.
“We believe the incorporation of these assets into NowCM provides increased clarity and direction and will help position us to accelerate the adoption of digital solutions in and overall growth potential of primary bond markets across fragmented workflows in the EU, UK, as well as globally”, says Koller.
NowCM will integrate Nivaura’s blockchain-neutral tokenisation solutions, continue to support the DCM Flow platform of the London Stock Exchange, commit to making Nivaura’s General Legal Markup Language, also known as GLML, native to its own platform and provide enhanced automation and issuance services to Nivaura’s existing issuer and bank clients.
Koller comments, “We are very proud to note that NowCM’s capabilities and open architecture are increasingly being recognised as the portal to digital capital markets. Since the beginning, NowCM has focused on identifying and solving real-life challenges. One of our key ambitions was to deliver more than just efficiency gains and real-time execution. We want to make this digitalisation journey about how we grow markets, grow funding opportunities for issuers and grow the DCM customer bases of banks and other service providers.”
©Markets Media Europe, 2023
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