Montréal-based financial technology startup TickSmith Corp has closed a $2 million strategic investment with Illuminate Financial Management, a U.K. venture capital firm. Launched in 2012, TickSmith provides software that helps manage capital markets data. Its assists exchanges, trading groups and other financial services businesses with data centralization and distribution, surveillance, risk management, strategy discovery and analytics. Led by Co-Founder and CEO Francis Wenzel, the company plans to use the funds raised to further commercialize its flagship product, TickVault, and build a global client base.
PRESS RELEASE
TickSmith Receives Strategic Investment From Illuminate Financial – The Investment Will Help TickSmith Meet The Demand From Exchanges, Banks And Buy-Side Institutions To Use Big Data Technology To Centralise And Monetise Large Volumes Of Capital Markets Data
20/07/2017
TickSmith, a leader in big data applications for capital markets, has announced a strategic investment of CAD $2 million from Illuminate Financial Management LLP, a venture capital firm with a specific focus on capital markets financial technology, to further commercialise its flagship product, TickVault.
TickSmith addresses a growing need of exchanges, banks and buy-side institutions in capital markets: exploring and unlocking value from constantly growing volumes and ever-increasing sources of financially relevant data. TickSmith powers the data distribution platform of CME Group, enabling the exchange to monetise its historical data. The National Bank of Canada is also amongst its global client base.
Described as a financial data lake platform for capital markets, TickVault provides the missing link to centralise data from external and internal data feeds and enables API access to feed current and future data-intensive applications including data distribution, MiFID II compliance and reporting, backtesting of trading algorithms, market surveillance, risk management, and machine learning analytics.
As electronic trade volumes grow, the quantity of financial data that must be aggregated, normalised and stored has reached unprecedented levels. For example, OPRA, the Options Reporting Authority recorded a significant increase in volume of the last sale and quotation information it disseminated from 1.4 to 10.5 million messages per second from 2010 – 2017. Moreover, regulatory bodies are increasingly demanding that transaction data, trade and quote data be stored and made readily accessible.
In addition to complying with new post-trade reporting and risk requirements, such as MiFID II and The Fundamental Review of The Trading Book (FRTB), TickVault also provides access to all this information via a single source of data for internal compliance and risk management teams. Using an automated and centralised environment that provides high quality data reduces the time required for low-value, high-effort tasks like data preparation and data cleaning. This also allows highly adaptable and robust regulatory reporting capabilities as well as allowing quick integration of existing and new data science tools.
TickSmith was founded by four industry veterans with decades of experience in developing and managing financial services data and technology solutions. The team has extensive experience in designing infrastructure for banks and have worked at companies like Morgan Stanley, Desjardins, IBM and FIS, formerly SunGard.
Mark Beeston, Managing Partner at Illuminate Financial Management LLP comments: “Data is taking the centre stage in capital markets. Consolidating high quality data and making it easily accessible is crucial throughout the whole trade lifecycle. TickSmith is at the forefront of this trend and is a vital piece of a next-generation, highly scalable and modular financial infrastructure, built on big data technology. With an experienced leadership team, a fully developed product offering and increasingly global client base – the firm strongly aligns with our investment strategy. We will also take a seat on the TickSmith management board and look forward to working closely together.”
Francis Wenzel, CEO and co-founder Co-Founder, TickSmith, comments: “Market participants recognise the competitive advantage that can be gained from a next generation capital markets data lake, not just in Europe and North America, but increasingly on a global basis. As venture capital specialists within the capital markets technology space, Illuminate Financial are well positioned to help us further develop our flagship product, Tickvault, as we continue to build an international client base.”
About Illuminate Financial Management
Illuminate Financial Management LLP is a venture capital firm that crosses the chasm between capital markets fintech and the financial institutions it should serve. The firm was founded in 2014 recognising the growing importance of Fintech but questioning how much it was contributing to building more sustainable financial institutions. IFM have created partnerships with core strategic investors and a growing number of Capital Markets firms to gain real insight into what the market needs. We leverage this to find, validate and fund early stage companies and harness our extensive experience across banking, entrepreneurship and consultancy to help these companies achieve their full potential.
About TickSmith
TickSmith, with its TickVault financial data lake platform, is a leader in Big Data applications for Capital Markets. The platform is used for data centralization and distribution, market surveillance, risk management, strategy discovery and analytics. It is ideal for trading and risk groups, regulators, exchanges and data vendors who need to accumulate, transform, analyse and disseminate larger scales of financial data from multiple sources.
Photo courtesy of TickSmith Corp