Appital and Turquoise launch buyside to buyside bookbuilding platform
“The launch of Appital Turquoise BookBuilder represents a step change for the asset management industry in the way they unlock and proactively drive liquidity in the market, ushering in a new era of automation in equity markets.”
Appital and LSEG-owned Turquoise have joined forces to launch a buyside to buyside bookbuilding platform that gives institutional investors the opportunity to proactively source liquidity.
The Appital Turquoise BookBuilder has gone live with Norges Bank Investment Management, the European trading team of the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. The team has successfully originated and executed the first trade, through a series of bilateral transactions.
The algorithmic bookbuilding platform allows buy side to participate in liquidity discovery, price formation, and execution opportunities in multiple days’ volume in listed equities.
“A step change for the asset management industry”
Mark Badyra, CEO of Appital, commented: “The launch of Appital Turquoise BookBuilder represents a step change for the asset management industry in the way they unlock and proactively drive liquidity in the market, ushering in a new era of automation in equity markets. From today, the buyside community has greater exposure to deal flow opportunities they have not been able to access before, and investors can interact with like-minded institutions in the liquidity and price formation process.”
Robert Barnes, Group Head of Securities Trading & CEO Turquoise Global Holdings at London Stock Exchange Group, said: “Appital Turquoise BookBuilder delivers the next significant efficiency for asset managers and contributors of capital. Where bookbuilding is the appropriate mechanism to find the right price for large block trades, Appital Turquoise BookBuilder™ innovates with the world’s first automation of buyside bookbuilding seamlessly integrating STP trading to settlement.”
Emil Framnes, Global Head of Trading and Transition at Norges Bank Investment Management, said: “Unlocking latent liquidity and executing multiple days’ ADV is essential to achieving our investment objectives. We welcome Appital’s innovative peer to peer access of hard-to-find liquidity and executing large volumes using Appital Turquoise BookBuilder™ without market impact or the risk of price erosion. Appital’s intuitive interface and integration made adoption easy.”
Greg Bennett, Chair of Appital and former Head of Capital Markets for EMEA & Americas for Fidelity International commented: “Liquidity has been a systemic issue in the equity markets for years. Given the evolution of the electronification of markets, we have demonstrated that we have been able to both reverse the trend of shrinking trade sizes and offer the next evolution in the market for size with Appital Turquoise BookBuilder.”
EMS vendors include Flextrade, Factset’s Portware and TS Imagine
The EMS vendors connected at the time of first trade include Flextrade, Factset’s Portware and TS Imagine, according to the announcement.
In the run-up to launch, Appital worked with industry champions to develop the necessary technological infrastructure to support essentially a new liquidity discovery mechanism and workflow, integrating with EMS providers FlexTrade, FactSet Portware, and TS Imagine, and executing brokers Bernstein and Instinet.
Through the integration with Turquoise, buyside firms benefit from a single point of access and execution, with seamless straight-through-processing (STP) to more than 20 settlement destinations.
The new bookbuilder platform boasts a number of features for the buyside community:
- Deal originators have real-time visibility of the entire life cycle of the bookbuilding process, allowing them to make distribution adjustments throughout;
- Deal participants can highlight the types and sizes of opportunities they are looking for, specifying market, sector, market cap and size of interest;
- Institutional investors set their own preferences to ensure they are only exposed and alerted to relevant liquidity, and interact bilaterally with each like-minded institution on the other side of the trade in the liquidity and price formation process.
Appital’s distribution methodology is automated, highly efficient and unconflicted, delivering a fair outcome to all market participants, driven by buyside preferences; - Smaller firms looking to trade large blocks, that would historically be excluded from the relationship-driven bookbuilding process, are now able to participate in the liquidity formation process. They gain exposure to deal flow opportunities previously not accessible to them, to actively drive liquidity in the marketplace.
