Today, SIX announced its new strategic partnership with Contineo, a Hong Kong based leading trading platform for structured products in Asia. SIX will support the standardization of the Asian structured products market by providing its high-performance product life-cycle infrastructure CONNEXOR in the first half of 2018. This offers synergies and scale opportunities to its shareholders, clients and the Asian market.
Joining the consortium of Contineo as a strategic partner and investor is a first major step towards the internationalization of the CONNEXOR service. The geographic expansion is intended to standardize processes along the value chain and the life-cycle management of structured products internationally. This allows shareholders and clients of SIX to utilize their established set-ups already used in local markets also outside of Europe and thereby benefit from synergies and scale in return. Contineo’s network of issuers, private banks and wealth management firms benefits from the long established infrastructure experience of SIX in order to grow the Asian market for structured products.
Christoph Landis, Division CEO SIX Swiss Exchange, commented: “Today, we are very proud to announce the internationalization of CONNEXOR and happy to see that more market participants around the world will enjoy the efficiency gains that our unique offering has already provided reliably to the Swiss marketplace.”
Mark Munoz, CEO of Contineo, commented: “This new partnership confirms our core principles of operating an open and shared network that benefits all financial institutions by reducing cost and increasing efficiency.”
CONNEXOR is an infrastructure for financial products data. It offers market participants a series of services throughout a financial instrument’s entire life-cycle and supports the fulfillment of regulatory obligations such as MiFID II or IRS 871(m). The central, standardized capture and maintenance of product data simplifies workflows and reduces the number of interfaces. As a result issuers, data vendors and data recipients benefit from substantial efficiency advantages.
Contineo is the first industry supported, open trading platform for private banks and wealth management firms to access issuers of structured products. It launched in January 2015 with the backing of most of Asia-Pacific’s key structured products houses and has built up a strong issuer base. Besides SIX, its current shareholders include AG Delta, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, HSBC, and Societe Generale.