Source: Listings Ledger
The U.K.’s thousands of private companies and entrepreneur-led businesses will soon be able to access an instant valuation in real-time and at the touch of a button after the development of breakthrough technology by Listings Ledger Plc, a start-up at Scotland’s University of Strathclyde. The company has just filed for a patent in the US.
The revolutionary Fintech innovation uses publicly available information from Companies House. It combines that with financial information from stock markets to present a real-time valuation, allowing entrepreneurs and owners to realise the value of their equity more easily. It also enables employees to engage in more efficient bonus schemes and for smoother access of SMEs to corporate finance. In essence, the technology creates a virtual stock market for the U.K.’s private companies.
The technology was developed by a team based in Strathclyde’s Business School, one of the U.K.’s foremost centres for Fintech research and development. The University, a top 10 U.K. institution for licence royalty income, has a long and successful history of commercialisation of inventions and business innovations.
While the first market for development is the UK, the company plans to expand its offering rapidly into other countries including Ireland and in continental Europe. The roll out is facilitated by a global trend towards open digital government and a philosophy that promotes transparency, accountability and value creation.
The company has attracted considerable talent to its board, including former employees of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bloomberg, and is currently recruiting developers and hopes to grow its team substantially by the end of the year. Eventually the company hopes to create hundreds of jobs in its home city.
Commenting on the announcement, Daniel Broby, Director of the Centre of Financial Regulation and Innovation and Co-Founder, said:
“Scotland has always been at the forefront of financial innovation, and as a Scottish-based company we are proud to be driving technology that will benefit company owners, financial institutions and the wider UK economy.
“This patent application is the culmination of a great deal of academic research into this developing and ground-breaking technology. That said, it’s merely a milestone in our ambitions for Listings Ledger. We want to give private companies and the entrepreneurs behind them the benefits and freedom that publicly traded companies enjoy, creating a new market and ecosystem that can allow companies develop more rapidly through more easily available financing, thereby benefiting the entire economy.”
Chief Product Officer Matthew Welstead, formerly of Goldman Sachs, said:
“The applications of the Listing Ledger technology for investment banking and private equity investment are wide ranging, cutting out hours of costly manual calculations and opening up a whole new range of services and opportunities for financial markets.”
Chief Compliance Officer Andrew Smith, formerly of Morgan Stanley, commented:
“Ethics is at the heart of what we are doing at Listings Ledger, and we strongly believe that this technology will benefit a broad range of stakeholders, democratising access and promoting greater inclusion to a wider range of financial activities. We take our obligations to provide robust, accurate and timely valuations seriously, and our technological effort is focused solely on achieving this end.”
About the patent application
When awarded, the patent will protect Listing Ledger’s system to price valuations for 20 years, allowing the company to develop a robust and unique new market.
As a result of the patent filing, Listings Ledger Plc can soon start accepting private companies to participate in the beta testing of instant real time valuations. The beta test will validate Listings Ledger’s technology and will benefit those participating companies by virtue of their being the first to have their share prices displayed on the platform.
The company was advised on its Patent Application by Scintilla, a Glasgow based firm of patent attorneys.