PrimaryBid and Winterflood announce collaboration

PrimaryBid and Winterflood announce collaboration to accelerate digitisation of retail investor participation in capital markets

LONDON, January 26 2023

PrimaryBid and Winterflood today announce a collaboration to further advance UK retail investor participation in equity and debt capital markets, including IPOs and follow-on fundraises. Together the firms will offer API integration to any stockbroker or wealth manager wishing to distribute primary market deals to retail investor clients, leveraging the UK’s retail trading network which currently pools secondary market retail liquidity.

This digitisation initiative aims to significantly lower the frictional barriers in the UK’s retail capital raising infrastructure, including simplifying participation from almost £300bn of uninvested ISA monies currently held as cash1. Despite recent regulatory reforms designed to level the playing field for retail investors in the UK’s public markets, the distribution of IPOs and other time-sensitive transactions has traditionally remained a manual process and focused on institutional participation. Historically too many investors have not been presented with details of public company capital raisings and this collaboration will help address the absence of end-to-end automation and digitisation within the UK’s retail distribution infrastructure.

This initiative comes at a critical moment for the UK’s capital markets and for the status of retail investors within them. In 2022 HM Treasury’s ‘Secondary Capital Raising Review’, led by Mark Austin, stated clearly that retail investors should no longer be excluded from UK public company fundraisings while acknowledging that the framework to facilitate this participation was still novel and would require significant investment. In parallel, the arbitrary financial ceiling on retail investor participation in public company capital raises is set to be eliminated in 2023 via the Financial Services and Markets Bill, as part of the Chancellor’s commitment to widening the ownership of public companies.

Alex Skrine, Director and Head of Electronic Trading at Winterflood Securities, said: “PrimaryBid has the leading track-record in delivering retail access to IPOs and secondary fundraisings, and Winterflood has a 34-year history of developing innovative solutions to allow retail investors access to secondary market liquidity. This endeavour brings together two leading market infrastructure providers with an ambition to digitise retail investor access to capital markets and ensure investors are treated fairly.”

Anand Sambasivan, CEO of PrimaryBid, said: “The future is clear: regulatory changes in both the UK and abroad mean that retail investors will play a more meaningful role in the public markets. But the ambitions of UK policymakers will only be realised if the underlying plumbing that broadcasts deals, captures retail demand and delivers allocations is upgraded. In our European operations, API-driven access to the PrimaryBid deal platform has delivered outstanding results for corporate issuers, retail investors and the investment platforms that service them. I am excited to be collaborating with Winterflood on what we believe will be a meaningful step toward modernising the UK’s infrastructure.”

Media enquiries:

PrimaryBid: Mike Coombes | [email protected]

Winterflood Securities: Kaso Legg Communications | [email protected]

Notes to Editors:

About PrimaryBid: PrimaryBid is a regulated capital markets technology platform connecting public companies to their communities during fundraisings. Its digital capital raising platform features both B2B and B2C interfaces, unlocking access to IPOs, follow-on raises and other instruments to individual retail investors, improving capital formation and driving fairness into public markets.

A partner of London Stock Exchange and Euronext, PrimaryBid’s platform is host to hundreds of thousands of UK and European retail investors. In the UK, PrimaryBid has been used by nearly 300 FTSE and AIM companies. In February 2022, PrimaryBid announced a $190m Series C investment round, led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 to drive international expansion.

About Winterflood: Winterflood Securities is a leading market maker committed to providing liquidity and flexible execution services to retail brokers, asset managers and institutional investors. Its strengths are a combination of traditional trading values and the performance of its own cutting edge technology. Its experienced team of traders helps clients achieve high quality execution in over 15,000 tradable instruments including UK, European and North American Equities together with Investment Trusts, Exchange Traded Products, Fixed Income, Structured Products and Funds.

Founded in 1988, Winterflood has gone from being a niche market maker in the UK Small Cap market, to a mature, diverse and major liquidity provider across multiple asset classes in the UK and European markets. Winterflood Securities is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Close Brothers Group plc.

Source:

1. HMRC Official annual savings statistics, June 2022.