Appital

Appital expands European equity coverage

• Adds Virtu Financial’s POSIT MTF, providing buyside firms with execution capabilities for more than 21,000 equities across 24 European countries

• Connects Virtu Financial as an executing broker for client flow negotiated on the Appital BookBuilder platform

• Buyside firms benefit from liquidity discovery and price formation opportunities for illiquid equity positions

London, 3 September 2024: Appital, the peer-to-peer price discovery and liquidity sourcing technology for asset managers, today announced the addition of Virtu Financial’s POSIT MTF as an European execution venue, expanding Appital’s European equity coverage to more than 21,000 equities across 24 European countries.

At the same time, Appital adds Virtu Financial as an executing broker for client flows negotiated on Appital’s BookBuilder platform, offering the buyside community enhanced options for executing large orders.

Virtu Financial provides execution, liquidity sourcing, analytics, and workflow technology for institutional clients, including POSIT MTF, a dark multilateral trading facility, in Europe and the United Kingdom.

The announcement follows the integration of Virtu Financial’s Triton Valor EMS with Appital’s BookBuilder platform in April 2023.

Brian Guckian, Chief Business Development Officer at Appital, said: “Our collaboration with Virtu Financial was driven by client demand and provides asset managers with price discovery and execution capabilities in outsized equity positions, within a seamless workflow.”

Appital enables buyside firms to access hard-to-find, block liquidity, and connect with like-minded institutions in the price discovery and liquidity formation process. Clients can proactively source cross-border liquidity, ranging from large-cap equities to highly illiquid, small and mid-cap stocks, often in multiple days’ ADV, on the platform.

Guckian added: “To date, Appital has reached $13.5bn of buyside liquidity on its platform, with opportunities between $1 million and $260 million. 43 asset managers with >$20trn AUM are now signed up, with 60+ more in the onboarding stage, managing an additional $30trn AUM.”

Rob Boardman, CEO of Virtu Execution Services, EMEA, said: “We aim to help institutional clients discover quality liquidity while maintaining anonymity and minimizing market impact. We do this by leveraging cutting-edge technology to deliver liquidity to the global markets and innovative, transparent trading solutions to our clients.

The collaboration with Appital gives our clients additional liquidity and price discovery functionality in a market for size.”

Mark Badyra, CEO, Appital, concluded: “We have experienced a period of accelerated growth since Appital Insights™ went live in September 2023 and we introduced several workflow and functionality enhancements.

We have now reached a critical mass, as a significant number of large asset managers are onboarded and our platform liquidity has surged in recent months.

We are very excited about the collaboration with POSIT and Virtu Financial; it represents yet another milestone in our mission to bring innovation to equity capital markets.”

The collaborations with Virtu Financial’s POSIT MTF and its Execution Services complement existing integrations with Turquoise MTF and executing brokers Instinet and Bernstein.

ENDS

About Appital

Appital, the equity markets technology solution, unlocks latent liquidity and provides enhanced bookbuilding capabilities to institutional investors.

Appital allows the buyside community to gain greater exposure to deal flow and execution opportunities they have not been able to access before and interact with like-minded institutions in the liquidity discovery and price formation process. Asset Managers are able to proactively source cross-border liquidity or interact with natural liquidity that is relevant to them, ranging from large cap equities to highly illiquid, small and mid-cap stocks.

The Appital platform efficiently drives a bookbuilding process, providing institutional investors with opportunities to execute large volumes, often in excess of multiple days of ADV, with minimal market impact or risk of price erosion.

Appital Insights™ allows buyside institutions to gain feedback on the likelihood to launch a successful bookbuild, without alerting anyone within the market or risking price erosion, as well as allowing traders and PMs to gain passive exposure in equities they care about when considering minimum ADV ambitions and/or pricing thresholds.

Appital’s deal distribution methodology is highly efficient, unbiased and unconflicted, delivering a fair outcome for all market participants. Members of Appital’s buyside community have access to real-time visibility, full transparency and maximum control over the bookbuilding and deal distribution process.

The Appital platform is easy to access, embedded and integrated with leading EMS providers, and executing brokers Instinet and Bernstein. Deals are executed through the Turquoise MTF, via a single point of access and with seamless straight-through processing to over 20 settlement venues. For more information please visit our website and follow us on Twitter @AppitalHQ and LinkedIn.