A Busy Year

As we celebrate another summer solstice, (or for our Nordic friends, another midsommar), it also marks another year at the Invisso (formerly Euromoney) Global Borrower’s Conference. The Origin team was again duly represented at the conference, and it was a great opportunity to connect with clients and friends, old and new.

It was also another year for the Global Capital Bond Awards. We’re also proud to share that for the fourth year in a row, Origin has picked up the awards for “Best Technology Platform for the Primary Bond Markets.”  In previous years the awards were granted just for the SSA and FIG markets, but this year for the first time Global Capital gave an award for the Corporate market as well. Excitingly for us it was a hat-trick this year, with Origin picking up the accolades across all three categories!

What makes this award so special and unique is that it’s decided not by a panel of judges, but by polling the open market. Global Capital surveyed the Dealers and Issuers that make up the international bond market – ie our current, and future, clients – and they are the ones that cast their votes for the Best Technology Platform in each sector. To win these awards (again) is truly humbling, and a strong reflection of the significant time and effort we’ve put into building our product, and our customer base, over the past 9 years. 

As we finish up the first half of 2024, we thought it would be a good opportunity to highlight some of our biggest milestones and developments over the past 6 months.

Incredibly Strong Growth

Our Documentation product continues to set new records for adoption. So far this year we’ve completed 84 transactions across our Documentation tool. Last year we completed 138 for the full year, and two years ago it was only 64 for the full year, so you can see that the growth rate continues to be strong. Interestingly many more of our transactions are making it past the “termsheet” stage and include the production of final terms, with so far 50 Final Terms having been produced - this is up 79% year over year. Transactions were completed across 11 dealers and 35 issuers, showcasing the breadth of adoption across the market that we have achieved.

Opportunities for DCM

In addition to the frenetic activity on the platform, the team behind the scenes has been working hard on building and extending the platform to support more use cases and types of trades.

As regular followers will know, one of the primary benefits Origin brings is the ecosystem of integrations we have. We’re excited to share that this year, we’ve added another integration to the list in the form of Bloomberg! Once a termsheet is created on Origin, with the click of a button, our connectivity with Bloomberg instantly creates a security DES page on the Bloomberg terminal, populated with the trade details from the termsheet. Our integration with Bloomberg extends our market-leading ecosystem of post-trade integrations, which also includes IPAs, Exchanges, and CSDs.

Product Enhancements

In our Documentation product, we’ve added a number of enhancements to help support a wider variety of flows and issuance types. Two of the most significant improvements are:

Mentions + Private Commenting

Origin’s Documentation tool is a combination of a powerful document automation technology with a superb workflow and collaboration tool. That collaboration tool allows users to review, write comments, suggest edits, and approve documents. We’ve now extended the functionality so users can specifically tag other users in their comments, (ie “@Robert Taylor, please double check the use of proceeds language”), just as they’ll be familiar doing in other communication tools. Each mention will generate a targeted notification/email to the user, helping facilitate faster turnaround.  

Additionally, we’ve changed the workflow so users can write private comments to other users (ie comments that are not visible to the other members of the working group of a trade). We know this is very important especially for syndicated / benchmark transactions, as dealers and issuers like to write comments bilaterally to their counsel without the rest of the syndicate seeing those comments. Having received this feedback throughout the benchmark deals we’ve been involved in since last year, we are excited to have added this functionality to the platform.

Issuer Led Trades

We have the largest and most comprehensive market coverage out of any issuance platform in operation today, with 18 investment banks and over 100 frequent borrowers on board. But we’re still not at 100%. While we believe that we will get there, we want to make sure our clients can get 100% value from the tool from day 1. So, we’ve recently opened our workflow so that issuers can manage their entire documentation process on Origin even if their working with a dealer that is not on the platform on the other side.

Issuers can take any termsheet they receive from a dealer (probably over email) and drag and drop it into the Origin platform. Using Origin Extract, our machine-learning based data extraction tool, we can extract over 80+ data points. The issuer can then make use of our integrations to instantly generate the ISIN and create the security page on Bloomberg. They can also manage their own production of final terms if they choose to. For some issuers, we have streamlined the flow so much that the final terms are already 95% complete, leaving the issuer to fill in just a few remaining fields. While issuers may have previously relied on their dealers to take care of these administrative responsibilities, using technology and automation, we’re giving the power and control back to the issuer, saving time, reducing errors, and improving efficiency.

To our clients 

As you can see, the Origin team has been working incredibly hard over the past 6 months. So it’s especially sweet to be recognised by the market and our clients – not just via the awards, but also through the increasing traction and adoption we’re seeing on our platform. Of all the various aspects of our job, nothing is more rewarding than seeing our product live, in action, adding value to our clients as they are preparing for, or executing the next big deal in the market.

We all know there’s a better way for the capital markets to work, but change can only come from those who act to achieve it. We owe an immense gratitude to all our clients for their support over the years to help us make this vision a reality. To all of you, especially those who joined us at the very beginning – thank you for your continued support, feedback, encouragement, and recognition. We’re honoured to serve you, and we look forward to continuing to do so for many years to come.