The London Stock Exchange Group, which led a $17.5m fundraising round in 2019 (in which Luxembourg VC firm took part) and which participated in an $11m bond conversion last year, doesn’t seem to mind that fintech Nivaura has changed hands after its two founders left the startup last year.
The fintech, whose platform automates the issuance of financial instruments, had looked set for a standalone deal but was ultimately absorbed by LHoFT member NowCM.
Consolidation useful
“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,” commented NowCM CEO Robert Koller.
Put simply, these fintechs are at the forefront of the digitalisation of capital markets--bonds, equities, derivatives--and seek to enable businesses to accelerate their use of capital markets by replacing the frictions of humans and paper with distributed ledger technology, i.e., blockchain. And they want to do it all while remaining strictly compliant with all the rules related to financial markets (Mifid II, RGPD and CMU).
That’s what the press release says, explaining that the fintech will keep its “DLT-ready” strategy to support the adoption of native digital assets--integrating tokenisation solutions via Nivaura’s blockchain--and continue to support the London Stock Exchange’s DCM Flow platform, work towards making General Legal Markup Language (GLML) native to its own platform and provide enhanced automation and issuance services to Nivaura’s existing issuers and banking customers.
Resilient growth through digital
“The digital imperative is clear and real and increasingly omni-present in our economy, but it is not a goal in itself. It is that link to economic growth, and the potential to accelerate the delivery of resilient growth through digital capital markets that affects all of us. This is what matters and what people care about. So, this is what matters to us and what we care about,” commented NowCM’s executive chair and co-founder Fredrik Creutz.
The amount of the transaction was not disclosed and the fintech has not yet responded to Paperjam for further discussion. NowCM also owns and operates a multilateral trading facility (MTF), which is the world’s first and only primary market regulated by the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution (France) and the Autorité des marchés financiers (France). NowCM is also a member of Swift and has recently set up a development hub in Portugal.
This article in Paperjam. It has been translated and edited for Delano.