NowCM

Elevator Pitch

NowCM has a fundamental belief in the power of capital markets to finance economies and distribute capital efficiently. NowCM is implementing its long-term strategy to become the global omni-channel and golden source for bond issuance and to contribute to the establishments of new standards for primary debt markets.

NowCM is the only end-to-end regulated cloud-native platform and marketplace in Europe, where financial regulation serves an important role of ensuring the safety and soundness of the financial ecosystem. Many find the promise of decentralization and its potential to displace the regulatory state with DLT technology as a seductive ideal. NowCM takes a different approach: we are building a complete suite of modules, where one of our modules has a regulated issuance vehicle in Luxembourg and another core module is based in France, a multilateral trading facility (MTF) supervised by the French regulators ACPR and AMF. NowCM is also a SWIFT member. These modules work with the current value chain and systems allowing for a digital and real-time experience already now.

Problem Solved

We want to address two main problems and a third problem that needs to be solved in order to address the two big ones:

1. We want to dramatically enhance access to the bond markets for new issuers. In Europe the vast majority of debt remains on bank balance sheets, which, since the global financial crisis have become increasingly expensive from a capital perspective and undesirable from a risk concentration viewpoint. Some of these issues were hidden away in the low interest rate environment, but with rates on the rise this is becoming an increasingly visible problem.
   We solve this problem by providing a regulated Treasury as a Service, where we remove essentially all upfront preparation costs for new issuers. We want people to dare to try and not shy away from the entry costs.
2. We want to dramatically enhance price discovery and establish the first regulated marketplace for primary bonds in the world. When pricing bonds, dealers often rely on relatively illiquid benchmarks. To ensure liquidity, bonds have to be sufficiently large to generate a sufficiently large following and liquidity. This all contribute to inefficiencies in price discovery for all but the largest issuers in the market. What if there could be a constant primary/secondary bid and offer out there that would enable a more dynamic approach to financing and investing in credits?
   We solve this by putting real-time bond issuance onto a regulated multi-lateral trading facility. Many others show levels on so called “bulletin boards” but there is no one esle out there that can execute a PRIMARY – ie a new bond in real-time.
3. Solving both the above problems 1 and 2 require, efficient, flawless and real-time execution. Today the workflow of a bond involve several parties working in siloes on multiple contracts that have a lot of overlapping information. The process is both tedious, inefficient and prone to errors. Therefore, the third problmem we solve for is real-time execution. This is the all crucial entry-point, or cornerstone from which all digitisation and digitalisation will spring in practice.
   We solve this by offering a cloud-native, collaborative and open – yet MiFID2 and GDPR compliant modular software solution that enable multiple parties to create, negotiate and manage multiple contracts in one go.

Solution / Technology

• NowDocs: documentation creation, negotiation and management for any bond and CP
• NowServices: life cycle and workflow management tools+ speciality products for ESG / project finance and more NowTreasury: pre-approved EMTN programme + compartment vehicle as a service to issuers to broaden access to capital markets funding.
• NowMarkets: the worlds’ only cloud-native and regulated primary marketplace for fixed income securities.

Market Size

NowCM is an open eco-system and is available for new collaborations and interconnections. This is a European journey of contributing to the realisation of a capital markets union (CMU). Our clients include the largest global issuers, dealers that are consistently top ranked on the DCM league tables, exchanges, and FMIs. Our goal is to ensure that quality data and right information are available to participants across the ecosystem in real-time over the entire debt issuance value chain.

Although European, we also notice our imminent growth opportunities in Asia, the US and other regions. We count the leading global banks and European issuers among our clients.

Website

www.NowCM.eu