Growing from one client to an online investment platform with a $1.5B annual turnover, the Monaco-based company sets sights on Dubai for further expansion
After Privatam’s digital investment platform PARity transformed the company into one of the leading intermediaries of alternative investments in Europe and Latin America, the Monaco-based fintech came to Dubai this week as part of a world tour to showcase the technology that has quickly earned a reputation as the Netflix and Expedia of niche investments.
The tremendous sophistication of MENA financial markets and Dubai’s importance as a regional financial and commercial hub are the driving forces behind the company’s serious consideration of establishing a regional presence in the UAE’s largest city, explains Privatam founding partner Stanislas Perromat.
Perromat co-created Privatam with Arthur Bauch and Massimo Passamonti, fellow investment bankers united by a passion for structured investment products offering highly customized risk-return objectives. Their clients–wealth managers, family offices and private bankers–were excited to incorporate these niche products into their client portfolios but spent too much time trying to identify the ones each global investment bank was offering, assess their risk profiles and compare their returns.
Inspired by the ease of use of the Netflix movie library and Expedia travel search engine and price aggregator, the partners developed a digital platform called PARity in 2015. In a few minutes and clicks, the online portal allows wealth managers to:
- Set risk/return parameters,
- Compare returns from Barclays plc, BBVA, Citi, J.P. Morgan and many other investment banks on the same product in less than a minute,
- Purchase the choices with the highest yields, and
- Aggregate the products on a dashboard for 24/7 monitoring.
The product is now in its fourth iteration thanks to Steven Price, whose experience building large-scale trading platforms in London was tapped early on by the founding trio to turbo-charge the PARity platform, and who soon became the firm’s fourth partner.
PARity’s impact on the structured products market was significant: in the four years after the technology was created, more than $8 billion in structured products had been traded on the platform. By the platform’s second year in operation, Privatam was already the number-one seller of structured products in Latin America, and it has become a top-three seller in Europe. Privatam has also white-labelled PARity’s technology to select wealth managers who want to brand it as their own.
Said Perromat, “Technology is essential to financial risk management. A portfolio comprising several complex investment products issued by multiple banks and often linked to various underlying assets is confusing to understand, and the PARity platform is like a cockpit, giving the pilot all the information he or she needs to monitor external conditions and make decisions.”
