Appital, a developer of technological solutions for the equities capital markets, and Turquoise, a pan-European multilateral trading facility (MTF) have announced the launch of a joint MTF, the Appital Turquoise BookBuilder. According to the two companies, the new platform enables buy-side firms to find liquidity for their illiquid stock positions and set prices for those positions. In addition, the regulated Turquoise MTF facilitates clients to transact high-volume trades.
What the Appital Turquoise BookBuilder brings
Norges Bank Investment Management executed the first transaction on the Appital Turquoise BookBuilder system. By doing so, the new buyside workflow was verified, which included demand generation, bookbuilding, allocation, transaction distribution, and deal execution. Through a series of bilateral transactions, Norges Bank Investment Management, the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, successfully generated and executed the first transaction.
Norges Bank Investment Management provided valuable feedback throughout the development of this service. This ranges from integrating with the broker-neutral execution and order management technology FlexTrade to designing the user interface.
For Appital, the release of Appital Turquoise BookBuilder represents a watershed moment. The two companies have been on a mission to revolutionize and streamline the book-building process. Having a centralized access and execution point is a great asset for buy-side firms, and this is exactly what they get with the Turquoise integration.
Furthermore, it offers STP (straight-through-processing) to over 20 settlement locations without any manual intervention. In addition, institutional investors will have better access to liquidity opportunities and better pricing when trading in a market for size.
For many years, equities markets’ lack of liquidity has been a widespread problem. The buy-side community previously had limited access to deal flow prospects. However, this has changed with the opening of the new facility by the two companies. Moreover, investors can network with other institutions that share their views on the market’s liquidity and price development.