Bond Origination Technologies (Bots), a London-based financial technology start-up for the primary debt capital markets (DCM), has completed its latest fundraising round, formed its advisory board and is set to launch its new software product for investment banks.
Bots is an end-to-end platform for the pre-trade origination process allowing investment banks to maintain live pricing curves for any of the 10,000+ different issuers in the bond market, to swap and export pricings for direct delivery to clients and to run analytics on new issue pricing datasets.
Stephan Gimpel, CEO and co-founder, Bots
Stephan Gimpel, CEO and co-founder of Bots and a former DCM banker said, “For every bond that is executed, banks send hundreds of pricing indications and related analysis to each issuer while pitching for the business. This is currently a manual process involving countless emails, spreadsheets, internal and external data feeds – and frustration. Our goal is to move away from that and provide banks with real time visibility on new issue pricing for all of their clients, for all relevant markets, all of the time.”
Bots consolidates the new issue pricing update process in a single web application, bringing together relevant market data, calculations and analytics and leveraging proprietary algorithms to reduce the need for manual intervention. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution is designed to optimise repetitive workflows and free up DCM and syndicate desks for more value additive tasks.
Oliver Corstjens, Co-founder, Bots.
Oliver Corstjens, Co-founder and a former syndicate banker added, “The DCM workflow, despite having many tedious aspects, has remained largely the same throughout Stephan’s and my careers. We’re excited to have assembled a team of industry practitioners and technologists as well as the necessary data resources that allow us to deliver a solution that really addresses DCM and syndicate users’ pain points.”
In order to further expand its product offering, grow its in-house development team in the UK and support its roll out to clients, Bots just closed an external funding round and brought on board a group of experienced investors and advisors.
This includes JLR Star, a fintech-focused investment firm with expertise in DCM and figures from within the industry including:
• Peter Charles, former head of EMEA Fixed Income Syndicate at Citigroup and a Non-Executive Director of Bots;
• Sarwat Faruqui, former head of EMEA Syndicate & co-head International Syndicate at MUFG;
• Hugh Carter, former head of Credit Syndicate and deputy head of Global Syndicate at Commerzbank.
The technology side of the business is led by Daniel Warner, who has over 10 years of experience architecting and developing business-to-business fintech applications.
Making the bond issuance business more efficient is driving a series of new launches in primary markets technology, including offerings from Liquidnet and DirectBooks.
The Bots platform will be rolled out in early 2021 and Bots is now inviting banks to become early adopters. For any enquiries please contact: info@bondorigination.com
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