Appital

Collaboration designed to create a new buyside source of liquidity for hard-to-trade blocks in European stocks

London, 28 January 2022 - Appital, the Equity Capital Marketplace, today announced that Instinet will be the first executing broker to work with the Appital Bookbuilding platform, scheduled for launch in Europe in 2022.

Appital enables institutional investors to proactively source pan-European liquidity, including in highly illiquid, small and mid cap stocks. The platform unlocks latent liquidity and efficiently drives a bookbuilding process providing deal originators with opportunities to execute large volumes, often in excess of 5 days of ADV, with minimal market impact or risk of price erosion. At the same time, deal participants set their own preferences to ensure they are only exposed and alerted to relevant liquidity.

Over the last few months, Appital and Instinet have collaborated closely to create a channel for new execution flow uniquely suited to buyside firms seeking greater exposure to European deal flow and block trading opportunities they have not been able to access before. Asset managers are able to interact with like-minded institutions in the liquidity and price formation process, and any flow that is formed and negotiated on the Appital platform can be executed via Instinet.

What’s more, the Appital partnership with Turquoise means buyside firms benefit from via a single point of access and with seamless straight-through-processing (STP) to over 20 settlement venues.

Mark Badyra, CEO of Appital, said: “What we set out to do with Appital is provide unique, electronic price formation capabilities of illiquid equity positions to enable execution with minimal market impact or risk of price erosion. Through our collaboration with Instinet we have created a new execution workflow that has not existed before; one that best facilitates the needs of our joint asset management client base.”

Badyra added: “We are thrilled to collaborate with Instinet to realise our ambition to bring innovation and automation to equity bookbuilding. Instinet’s agency-only execution model aligns with our business model; our deal distribution methodology is highly efficient and unconflicted, delivering accessibility and a fair outcome to all market participants”.

Richard Parsons, CEO, Instinet Europe, commented: “Embracing new technologies and finding new and innovative ways for our buyside clients to access hard to find liquidity are core elements of our mission. Appital’s bookbuilding platform is designed to give our joint client base an automated, more efficient way to proactively source scarce liquidity, often over multiple days, and drive a quality block bookbuilding process. We are delighted to collaborate with Appital in preparation for their European launch, and to deliver even greater access to liquidity to our clients.”

After a successful BETA program, Appital is commencing the formal onboarding process for many of the largest global asset managers over the coming months. More than 30 asset managers, who collectively manage over 30tn USD, are preparing to join Appital at launch, and are in the process of taking necessary legal and technical steps to take full advantage of the platform on day one.

Media contacts
Sybille Mueller, Bill Yelverton, Streets Consulting
E: sybille.mueller@streetsconsulting.com; bill.yelverton@streetsconsulting.com
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