Now CM eats up promising fintech Nivaura
London Stock Exchange Group, which led a $17.5 million fundraising round in 2019 (where the Luxembourg VC firm MiddleGame Ventures participated) and who participated in an $11 million bond conversion last year, doesn’t seem to mind that fintech Nivaura has changed hands after the two founders left the startup last year.
The fintech, whose platform automates the issuance of financial instruments, had appeared poised for a stand-alone deal but was eventually 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 the overall growth potential of primary bond markets across fragmented workflows in the EU, UK as well as globally,” commented NowCM CEO Robert Koller.
Simply put, these fintechs are at the forefront of the digitization of capital markets – bonds, stocks, derivatives – and seek to enable businesses to accelerate the use of capital markets by replacing the frictions of people 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 the financial markets (Mifid II, RGPD and CMU).
That’s what the press release says, explaining that the fintech will retain its “DLT-ready” strategy to support the adoption of native digital assets – integrating tokenization solutions via Nivaura’s blockchain – and continue to support the London Stock Exchange’s DCM Flow platform, working to make General Legal Markup Language (GLML) native to its own platform and offer enhanced automation and issuance services to Nivaura’s existing issuers and bank customers.
Resilient growth through digital
“The digital imperative is clear and real and increasingly ubiquitous in our economy, but it is not an end in itself. It is that link to economic growth, and the potential to accelerate the delivery of robust growth through digital capital markets that affects us all. This is what matters and what people care about. So this is what matters to us and what we care about,” commented NowCM’s chairman and co-founder Fredrik Creutz.
The transaction amount 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 was originally published in Paperjam. It has been translated and edited for Delano.
