Agora prepares to go live after completing pilot trades

Agora is preparing to go live with its end-to-end digital debt capital markets platform for syndicated bonds after completing a series of multilateral pilot trades over the past eight months.

The pilot sessions were comprehensive, testing a series of benchmark deals in euros and dollars with 14 investment banks, five sovereign, supranational and agency issuers and a major infrastructure provider.

“We’re very happy with how it all went,” says Charlie Berman, co-founder and chief executive at Agora. “We got great feedback and priceless input from the participants, which has helped us create a tool that people want to use.”

The company is now busy going through the complex onboarding processes specific to each user. “This is a lot of work for us and our customers and it’s just something that all sides have to wade through,” he continues. “We’ll be moving from a test environment to full production mode very soon which means we’ll be ready for live issues once the first users have completed all their onboarding checks, processes and approvals.”

Agora claims to be the first truly end-to-end digital workflow platform for the fixed-income market, enabling seamless interaction during the pre-issuance and launch of bonds through synchronising all parties in real time using distributed ledger technology.

“We’re looking at the whole lifecycle of a bond, from before it is announced all the way through to its redemption,” says Mr Berman. “That journey is long and complicated and involves a lot of different parties – not just issuers and bankers, but issuing and paying agents, central securities depositories, investors, etc.”

Agora went live with its structured retail products platform late last year and is hoping to go live with its syndicated bonds platform very soon, which will most likely begin with deals involving sovereigns, supranationals and agencies borrowers.

“From the issuer side, they do a lot of transactions, and they tend to be the place where innovation comes in the bond markets,” says Mr Berman.

Agora was set up in 2019 by Mr Berman and co-founder and chief product officer Naveed Nasar, both of whom have long histories in the bond markets.

The company closed a second funding round in 2020 with support from new investors including David Rutter, founder and chief executive of R3, whose Corda blockchain system Agora will operate on. In its maiden funding round in 2019, Agora was supported by Michael Spencer, the founder and former CEO of interdealer broker ICAP, which later became NEX Group.

“With this digital transformation which the world is going through, you can’t do everything on day one,” says Mr Berman. “That’s not the way it’s going to happen. It has to be a transition between the old and the new. In the bond market, a lot of practices have been pretty much the same for years, in part, because nothing’s broken. A record volume of bond issuance got done during the pandemic so there is the question of: why do we need to change now? The answer is that the technology has only emerged in the past decade to allow for a really meaningful change.”

Watch Agora's Tech Talk video here.