[ I N T E R V I E W | S T É P H A N E B O U J N A H ]
Hayley McDowell: Euronext had a prolific year in terms of acquisitions and investment in 2017, as well as several major product launches. How are those performing? Stéphane Boujnah: Euronext is fundamentally different from what it was a year ago and 2017 was a transformational year for the company with major projects both completed and ongoing. We acquired FastMatch in August 17 and expanded our offering into global forex markets. FastMatch has cutting-edge technology as the fastest growing communication network in foreign exchange markets. The good news is that the business side there is developing well. We are cross-selling the FastMatch offering into European markets with an increasing part of that business now being rolled out to major European bank centres. Secondly, we acquired the Irish Stock Exchange( ISE), which we announced in November and will close hopefully in March this year. This is a very interesting acquisition because not only is it a great company with a superb management team in a country with significant positive growth prospects, but it’ s an acquisition that provides several benefits to us. It demonstrates the Euronext federal model is attractive to independent exchanges that want to keep their identity within the federal governance model. In addition, this acquisition makes us less dependent on volume driven businesses. ISE is a global leader in debt and fund listing, so with that business we are less exposed to volatility trading and more independent from volumes.
The third pillar of our strategy expressed last year was that we significantly invested in non-volume rate businesses to structure a comprehensive offering of corporate services with several bolt-on acquisitions. These were made in order to provide our issuers clients with a range of tools to assist them with market challenges. We are very happy with all of the acquisitions and investments we made last year, and so far they are all performing very well. There were other projects that were very important for Euronext in 2017, including our clearing deal with LCH SA where we swapped our
“ Euronext is fundamentally different from what it was a year ago and 2017 was a transformational year for the company”.
2.3 % stake in LCH Group for 11.1 % stake in LCH SA, and we signed a ten year clearing of financial securities agreement. This is not as good as owning LCH SA as we tried to do at the beginning of 2017, but the situation is much better than where we were at the end of 2016. With all of these acquisitions we have paved the way for an even stronger future at Euronext.
HM: Euronext also ventured into major agreements with firms across the industry like Morningstar and Algomi. How have those projects developed? SB: There were several joint agreements we entered into last year, including with Morningstar where we are developing European indices for blue chips. We recently launched the Morningstar Eurozone 50 index, and the first futures contracts on that index were launched in January. This was critical ambition for us and the deal with Morningstar was all about the development of new indices so we could trade them. With Algomi, things are going well and the European multilateral trading facility( MTF) is live and approved by the Financial Conduct Authority( FCA), and approval from the US regulator is ongoing. We are now in the commercial phase of that project, bringing more and more participants to the platform. On top of those projects, we have also launched regulatory services to support clients with MiFID II reporting requirements. Our two services including the approved publication arrangement( APA) and approved reporting mechanism( ARM) are continuing to service our clients and attract new business.
Euronext also entered the blockchain world. But we’ ve tried to do
52 // TheTrade // Spring 2018