“[Julius Baer] will benefit from this industry backed initiative, as it aims to enhance the execution of equity-linked structured products in the Asia-Pacific region,” said Roger Meier, head of structured products sales Asia at Julius Baer.
The Hong Kong-based open messaging and price discovery platform expects to bring onboard a number of issuers and private banks before the end of the year, according to Mark Muñoz, managing director of the multi-dealer platform.
“We have been operating for a little more than a month and the response from issuers showing interest has surpassed our expectations,” said Muñoz. “We have a huge amount of momentum because on one side private banks are interested in standardising the market and on the other hand issuers are interested in lowering their costs.”
The biggest challenge for Contineo is to make sure there is a clear understanding of what private banks need and for this purpose the firm has formed an advisory committee, said Muñoz.
Contineo is in talks with five technology firms servicing the Asia Pacific wealth management market to capitalise on the connectivity they have to add value to what they are offering and lower operating costs including infrastructure management and maintenance faced by issuers when dealing with multiple private banking technology interfaces, said Muñoz.
“From the outset, Contineo was launched to be a platform open to other third parties, not just from an issuer perspective, but also from a technology perspective,” said Muñoz. “Contineo’s aim is to provide a transparent platform where third parties can connect to access structured products.”
“There are a number of tech providers out there that offer pre-and post-trade processing services, and we want to make sure we can connect those vendors that offer full back-to-front solutions service in one place.”
The new platform will continue to add functionalities beyond price discovery, said Muñoz. “We don’t want to limit this to a few issuers, private banks and tech platforms,” he said. “This is not about connecting issuers but about building a community.”
Contineo, which is backed by a consortium of banks including JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Barclays, BNP Paribas and Société Générale, and technology firm AG Delta, was launched in January to provide greater access to equity-linked structured products for private banking and wealth management firms.
Contineo supports messaging for equity-linked notes, including knock-out equity linked notes, accumulators/decumulators, fixed coupon notes, daily range accrual notes, and over the counter products through a single API connection for Hong Kong and, more recently, the US, Singapore and Japan.
by Pablo Conde
www.structuredretailproducts.com