London Stock Exchange Group leads $20m investment in automation fintech Nivaura

London Stock Exchange Group (LSE) has invested in Nivaura, the UK fintech deploying digital investment platforms for banks, exchanges and other financial institutions.

The group led the way in a $20m (c.£15m) funding round that will enable Nivaura to unlock growth by expanding its leadership, business development and technical teams.

By hiring additional technical market professionals, the company said it will be in a position to speed up product development and expand its expertise in machine learning and natural language processing.

London-based Nivaura also plans to take its offering into more jurisdictions and cover new asset classes.

The firm is focused on automating the issuance and administration processes for financial instruments.

Its platforms are created to connect and automate fragmented and manual processes. For certain types of transaction, it is able to slash time-to-market by up to 60-80%.

The funding round included participation from law firms Allen & Overy and Linklaters, venture capital investor Transamerica Ventures and Santander’s corporate venture arm InnoVentures.

Nivaura CEO Dr Avtar Sehra said: “Our focus for 2019 is on conducting a series of high profile, large-scale projects with high calibre partners to demonstrate our platform as a valuable solution across the full spectrum of capital markets primary issuance activities.

“Working with such partners with their wealth of experience will underpin our next phase of growth.”

He continued: “We’re seeing growing appetite from major financial institutions for practical innovation that goes beyond buzzwords and conceptual PoCs in ‘digital investment banking’. Boards are saying: go forth and innovate.

“But doing so in the highly regulated and complex world of capital markets is immensely difficult. With our now proven approach and compliance credentials, we are able to finally help our industry take practical steps to innovate and improve their economics.”