IPC – a leading global provider of secure, compliant communications and networking solutions for the global financial markets is delighted to announce a strategic partnership with Digital Debt Capital Markets Ltd (“DDCM or agora”).

DDCM is a UK based fintech company, providing technology to enhance, upgrade and improve communication and processes from a bond’s issuance to repayment at its term. DDCM is developing its agoraSoftware solution to digitise the end-to-end life cycle of a bond. This technology will revolutionise the experience of issuers, investment banks and downstream service providers in the international bond markets.

agoraSoftware utilises market leading Distributed Ledger Technology (R3’s Corda Enterprise) paving the way for digital securities that comply with existing regulations, enhance information sharing and eliminate costly reconciliations whilst maintaining privacy. This technology revolutionises and enhances the entire life cycle of bonds where processes have not fundamentally changed for decades.

It aims to connect all major bond market participants from issuers, investment banks, issuing and paying agents and other service providers to a single golden source of critical bond information avoiding the need for the manual and duplicative input by each party to its own data silo. This information is digitally signed and made available as structured data in a permissioned and controlled manner to participants throughout the life cycle of a bond, eliminating the need for continuous reconciliation. By operating in a digital environment from inception, market participants will also benefit from the ability to embed and utilise “smart contracts” to govern and manage lifecycle functions in alignment with the natural language legal agreements, which define and govern their security operations.

“Our latest strategic partnership with agora delivers customers with direct access to their revolutionary, cutting-edge software which will be delivered via IPC’s world-class infrastructure,” says Robert Coole, Vice President Cloud Technologies, IPC. “By leveraging our trusted Connexus Cloud financial ecosystem, Agora’s innovative end-to-end solution is instantly accessible in our marketplace to a global community of over 110,000 users and nearly 7,000 market participants.”

Charlie Berman, co-founder and CEO of DDCM said: “We are delighted to have partnered with IPC. It has one of the largest and most secure communities of financial market participants in the bond markets and is used widely by precisely the organisations and institutions for whom the software has been designed. This relationship provides our first clients with a seamless and trusted opportunity to collaborate, use and test the agoraSoftware and is a first important step in the evolution of the agoraSmartbond.”

Tony Cleverly, Chief Technology Officer at DDCM said: “This important partnership with IPC has already allowed us to onboard clients in an effective and controlled environment. The support of IPC’s Connexus Labs has assisted us to develop, test and install our solutions for our bond market clients in a secure ‘cloud based’ environment. This meant we have been able to work with clients without the need for bespoke infrastructure and connectivity speeding up our development and testing of our bond market solutions.”
Source: IPC