Reflecting on 7 years of Origin
This week we attended the Global Capital Bond Awards dinner, where for the third year in a row, we won two awards:
“Best Technology Platform for the SSA Primary Bond Market”
“Best Technology Platform for the FIG Primary Bond Market”
The Global Capital Bond awards are probably the premier industry awards event for the debt capital markets. Importantly, the awards are voted on by market participants, not determined by event judges. Most of the awards go to banks or issuers, and there are very few categories dedicated to service providers. Our category for “fintechs” was actually only established 3 years ago, and we’re very proud to have won it every single year since then. It’s all the more important to us as it is a vote of confidence from our clients - demonstrating that they really believe in the value we’re trying to provide day in and day out.
Reflecting on the past
The awards dinner capped off a busy week with the Euromoney Global Borrower’s and Bond Investors forum happening in London this week as well. This is one of the main conferences for the industry bringing together the world’s largest borrowers and investment banks, and one that we’ve been going to for many years.
I was also on a panel at the conference this year, “Exploring Digital Solutions: the future of Primary,” where I was joined by a couple of issuers – MuniFin and EBRD – as well as a few fellow primary market fintechs including BondAuction, Agora, and Liquidnet.
The panel discussion was interesting in that one of the main themes was about the “pace of adoption” of technology within DCM. I highlighted to the group that I was actually on my first panel exploring technology and capital markets at the same conference seven years ago in 2016! It was interesting to reflect on what has changed and what hasn’t changed in those seven years.
Then and now
As you can see from this video of me taken after that 2016 panel, we started out with a fairly modest product aiming to help bring transparency and liquidity to the EMTN private placement market.
Since then, Origin has evolved to be a full service SaaS platform digitising every stage of bond issuance from origination through to listing and settlement. Over the past 7 years, we’ve definitely seen the topic of “technology within capital markets” go through its own evolution and lifecycle.
Back in 2016, we were having to convince market participants that there really was a problem worth solving and that the status quo for bond issuance was untenable. We spent a long time listening to clients telling us they knew the process wasn’t “perfect” but they didn’t see why it needed to be changed.
A blessing and a curse
Fast forward a couple of years, and by 2019 and 2020, the topic started to finally resonate at an industry wide level (you could tell as it was a must-have panel topic at every conference). This led to a huge growth in interest and resources deployed by the industry to evaluate how best to take advantage of it.
If I had to attribute the change of heart to one thing, I would say it was “crypto-FOMO.” The crypto world was exploding and evolving so fast, it offered a glimpse into a parallel universe of what the capital markets could look like.
Regular readers will know we’ve always been a little skeptical about the benefits of DLT within capital markets. So this new period of “hyper-enthusiasm” was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because suddenly anything related to technology was sexy for everyone in the industry - a huge tailwind for us. A curse because once people realised we didn’t utilise DLT, they moved on as we weren’t “sexy enough.”
A maturing narrative
In the last 18-24 months however, this topic (technology in capital markets) seems to be maturing.
There have been a few burned fingers in the crypto/DLT space (both within capital markets and outside of it), leading people to reassess how much focus they should place on those frontier technologies. But equally, people have recognised that there is a massive problem in manual workflows and unstructured data in capital markets.
And while it might not sound as trendy as “minting an NFT,” solving the problem of unstructured data and straight through processing can add real value to real people in their jobs, day in and day out.
The power of focus
I’d like to think our steady, focused approach has led us to succeed over this slightly longer time horizon – not getting distracted by the latest fad, and ensuring that everything we are doing is making someone’s life easier.
We’re happy to see this now bearing fruit, with more and more transactions going through the platform, and more and more dealers and issuers adopting Origin as their standard way of doing business.
And while clients, transactions, and market share are the main metrics we judge ourselves by, it’s certainly nice to be recognised by our clients with these awards, which we’ve won for the 3rd time in a row. A huge thank you to our clients, ecosystem partners, and most importantly our fantastic team, for trusting us and helping us go the distance.
