The European Fintech space has seen its newest entrant, with a consortium of leading exchanges and banks teaming up to launch LiquidShare. The new independent startup constitutes a collaborative effort, over a year in the making, that has been working to develop a post-trading Blockchain infrastructure for the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) market.
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SME’s access to capital markets has been one area of emphasis amongst many fintech firms. LiquidShare’s mandate will be to help streamline and ultimately support this access, along with the transparency and securities of post-trading operations using blockchain. Other industry initiatives had made similar success in this rapidly growing space recently, including Deutsche Borse’s Venture Network, which facilitated a successful IPO from NAGA Group this week.
LiquidShare is one of the more comprehensive collaborations to date, with the group constituting efforts by BNP Paribas, CACEIS, Caisse des Dépôts, Euroclear, Euronext, S2iEM, and Société Générale with the support of Paris EUROPLACE. The group will help mitigate transaction costs for SMEs, while also leveraging functional and technical expertise with a wide range of innovative solutions to work towards its goals.
In addition, LiquidShare will be exploring and harnessing blockchain technology – this will see a focus on virtual ledger technology that assembles data for shared distribution between many different users. This technology could prove to be one of the most pivotal in the industry moving forward, given its potential to simplify the chain of post-trade operations.
Head of Global Transaction Banking for France - Paris
Veteran leadership
The group itself will be installed in a Parisian incubator, deploying numerous industry experts to help jump start the program and better support the platform. As such, LiquidShare will be led by Thibaud de Maintenant, who has been appointed as Chief Executive Officer of the startup.
Euronext will also be lending its human capital to the project, tapping Anthony Attia, Managing Board member of Euronext, as LiquidShare’s Chairman of the Supervisory Board.
Mr. de Maintenant commented on the creation of the group: “With the launch of LiquidShare, we will use the great potential of the blockchain technology to become a key player in the post-trade industry. Supportedby shareholders across the European financial market ecosystem, this initiative is the first of its kind.”
