Appital

Appital expands offering to include pre-trade price discovery functionality

• An industry-first, Price Discovery in Appital Insights™ enables buyside traders to stimulate liquidity at market levels, or outside of the spread, before committing to a bookbuild

• New functionality allows trading desks and investment teams to interact with each other in outsized liquidity price formation, and opportunistic alpha generation, optimising deals before they launch on the platform

• Driven by client demand, Price Discovery in Appital Insights™, significantly shortens the period of time where shares are locked in to Appital whilst also providing more time for investment teams to react to situations

• Buyside traders retain full control over how and when they interact with their counterparts and platform liquidity

London, 29 August 2024: Appital, the peer-to-peer price discovery and liquidity sourcing technology for asset managers, today announced the launch of a new functionality designed to stimulate natural liquidity among Appital’s buyside clients and discover pricing dynamics on larger ADV orders on their pad.

Price Discovery in Appital Insights™ is an industry-first functionality that enables buyside traders to invite select feedback on live orders and gain insights on potential pricing and volume before committing an order to a bookbuild or before launching a bookbuild themselves.

Buyside traders retain full control over how and when they interact with their counterparts and platform liquidity. PMs can respond to price discovery processes without generating an order in their EMS, allowing for opportunistic liquidity discovery and alpha generation. The Appital workflow now enables new, uncommitted order types during price discovery, which can transition to committed order types once traders decide to launch a bookbuild. This significantly reduces bookbuild duration while increasing the likelihood of its success. At the same time, buyside firms retain anonymity and minimise the risk of leakage or price erosion.

Price Discovery in Appital Insights™ evolves the existing workflow and goes one step further: Appital clients can unlock latent liquidity by inviting specific firms to provide feedback on potential orders and - if sufficient demand is captured in price discovery - the information flows anonymously back to the originator to launch a bookbuild, and the liquidity is realised.

Brian Guckian, Chief Business Development Officer at Appital, said: “Our clients are very excited about this new price discovery functionality. They can pick their counterparts, expose a potential deal to them, and get feedback on volume and pricing, before deciding to go ahead with a bookbuild. This is a new and unique workflow that gives clients full control over the bookbuilding process and the ability to proactively stimulate market liquidity.”

Mark Badyra, CEO of Appital, said: “With Price Discovery in Appital Insights™ we are digitising yet another step in the high-touch trading mechanism while also minimising risk of information leakage and price erosion. This aligns with our strategy to deliver unique workflows to trading and investment teams. I believe that illiquidity issues can be solved globally by bringing technological innovation into the equity market and providing distinctive functionality to the buyside. With Price Discovery in Appital Insights™, firms are able to generate orders that would otherwise not exist, resulting in increased deal flows and liquidity events.

The first half of 2024 has been a period of remarkable growth for Appital, with consistent, month-on-month increases. As well as this, our liquidity profile has diversified from a client perspective, with more and more firms joining and using our technology every day.”

Appital has reached $12bn of buyside liquidity on its platform, with average orders of 2.7 days ADV and 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.

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.