As Market Participants Seek New Solutions to Comply with March 1 Variation Margin Deadline, Collateral Management Provider Quadruples Business
London / New York, 14 March 2017 – CloudMargin, the multi-award winning creator of the world’s first web-based collateral and margin management solution, today announced that it has signed a leading U.S.-based asset manager, helping the client achieve full compliance of its thousands of over-the-counter (OTC) agreements included in the new Variation Margin rules that took effect March 1.
Since the beginning of 2017, CloudMargin has seen a 50 percent increase in the number of clients it serves and a quadrupling of the number of active underlying Credit Support Annex (CSA) agreements for which it manages clients’ collateral. The new business represents CloudMargin’s most successful quarter to date in client and user base growth since its launch three years ago. As a result, the firm attracted renewed investor interest and closed a significant Series A funding round.
The company now serves market participants on five continents, including asset managers, insurance companies, brokerage firms and banks. CloudMargin also has established an extensive network of nearly 20 exchanges, clearing firms and other technology solution partners, providing an opportunity for clients to create a collateral management solution tailored to their unique needs.
A need to achieve operational efficiencies, coupled with new regulatory requirements that came into play on March 1, have led to significant interest in onboarding the CloudMargin platform. The new buy-side client, with hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars in assets under management, will use the platform to manage all of its bilateral OTC derivatives and TBA bonds activity globally.
The recent growth enjoyed by the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider attracted a round of Series A funding from Illuminate Financial Management LLP, which became the firm’s first institutional investor in 2015. Since then, CloudMargin has won eight industry awards, and London’s Financial News named it one of the top 10 European FinTech firms to watch in the capital markets in 2017.
Mark Beeston, founding partner at Illuminate Financial Management LLP and now Chairman of CloudMargin, said: “CloudMargin’s rapid expansion and growth has been very positive for our portfolio, and the company is well positioned for exponential growth with the renewed focus on collateral management across the industry. The team, the product, the client influx and the revenue growth all made it an easy decision to further our own investment in the company.”
Steve Husk, CloudMargin CEO, said: “This has been a truly exciting time in our development because we’ve been able to apply our core strengths to meeting a critical industry need. When firms understand that we offer the opportunity to rapidly deploy our robust cloud-based solution, without requiring a significant investment of their staff time or resources, they are very responsive. We are pleased to continue our growth in the U.S. as well as globally and expect that this first quarter expansion is just the tip of the iceberg.”