Over the past eight months, agora Digital Capital Markets – the fintech headed and co-founded by former Bank of America, Salomon Brothers and Barclays debt capital markets banker Charlie Berman – has been running a series of tests of new software to automate the pre-trade negotiation, primary market execution, settlement and life-cycle functions of new bond deals.
Agora is one of a group of firms – along with Fnality and Nivaura – that see various technologies, including the artificial intelligence (AI) behind legal mark-up language and blockchain for sharing of agreed and confirmed terms, coming together for a new digital age in debt capital markets.
“We now have a V1 syndicated bond product that will go into live use after a great deal of input from users and continuously be updated,” Berman tells Euromoney.
Fourteen investment banks – representing more than half of the market as measured by the 2021 sovereign supranational and agency (SSA) bookrunner league table – five SSA issuers, and a large infrastructure provider participated in a series of test benchmark deals in dollars and euros.
These were executed on a private permissioned distributed-ledger technology (DLT) network on R3’s Corda platform.
Euromoney
