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News
Octaura trading platform secures funding boost
by David Rollier & Lisa Fu
Fintech firm Octaura seeks to bring CLO trading into the future, using automation to speed up manual tasks and allowing managers to move quickly in key moments. But the firm’s greatest challenge is convincing the industry to abandon legacy processes and take a leap of faith.
Last month, the fintech firm secured an additional USD 46.5m in funding from major banks and asset managers to support the upcoming launch of its CLO trading platform.
Octaura plans to use technology and a network developed in the leveraged loan market and apply it to the CLO market.
Octaura started by rolling out a trading platform for syndicated loans and automating what CEO Brian Bejile calls “the bane of every trader’s (and salesperson’s) existence” — running BWICs and OWICs manually.
The firm claims to have streamlined the slow back-and-forth email process for leveraged loans and aims to bring the same efficiency to the CLO market, starting with CLO BWICs.
There are various versions of the chicken-and-egg problem
Brian Bejile
CEO
Octaura
If the new CLO platform succeeds, it will turn a three-hour process into a “30-to-45-minute exercise”, Bejile said. He believes automation reduces human error, and that time savings will lead to more trade and larger funds.
But getting counterparties to adopt the platform has been a challenge. Over the last two years, Octaura’s share of the leveraged loan market grew to 5% from 0%. This might seem like little progress, but adoption of electronic trading in other sectors has been just as difficult.
Electronic bond trading — which has been around for 20 years or so — needed a decade for adoption to reach 2% of the high yield bond market, according to Bejile.
“The truth of the matter is, this is not easy,” he said. “There are various versions of the chicken-and-egg problem.”
While the market sees that the solution makes sense, buy-side investors want to know if the banks are already onboard, and the banks also want to know if the buy-side has adopted this or if their clients are already participating. They all want to know if the time, effort, resources and all the legal and technical work associated with adopting the platform will pay off, he said.
Octaura is also hoping the recent tariff-induced volatility in the leveraged loan and CLO markets in April might also prompt more interest in timely trading.
“If you need to move risk or capital quickly, having an electronic platform becomes critical,” Bejile said.
