Appital has announced the addition of Virtu Financial’s POSIT MTF as a European execution venue, as well as an executing broker for client, flows negotiated on Appital’s BookBuilder platform.
The announcement follows the integration of Virtu Financial’s Triton Valor EMS with Appital’s BookBuilder platform in April 2023.
Difficult-to-find block liquidity
Appital has enhanced its platform, enabling buy-side firms to access difficult-to-find block liquidity and connect with like-minded institutions for price discovery and liquidity formation. Through this platform, clients can proactively source cross-border liquidity, covering large-cap equities to highly illiquid small and mid-cap stocks, often in volumes spanning multiple days’ average daily volume (ADV).
Appital’s recent collaboration with Virtu Financial, including its POSIT MTF dark multilateral trading facility, and its Execution Services, complements existing integrations with Turquoise MTF, Instinet, and Bernstein. This new partnership broadens Appital’s European equity coverage, now encompassing over 21,000 equities across 24 European countries. The collaboration also enhances options for the buy-side community to execute large orders.
Virtu Financial specializes in execution, liquidity sourcing, analytics, and workflow technology for institutional clients in Europe and the United Kingdom, with POSIT MTF being a key component of its offerings.
“We aim to help institutional clients discover quality liquidity”
Brian Guckian, Chief Business Development Officer at Appital, said: “Our collaboration with Virtu Financial was driven by client demand and provides asset managers with price discovery and execution capabilities in outsized equity positions, within a seamless workflow. To date, Appital has reached $13.5bn of buyside liquidity on its platform, with opportunities between $1 million and $260 million. 43 asset managers with >$20trn AUM are now signed up, with 60+ more in the onboarding stage, managing an additional $30trn AUM.”
Rob Boardman, CEO of Virtu Execution Services, EMEA, said: “We aim to help institutional clients discover quality liquidity while maintaining anonymity and minimizing market impact. We do this by leveraging cutting-edge technology to deliver liquidity to the global markets and innovative, transparent trading solutions to our clients. The collaboration with Appital gives our clients additional liquidity and price discovery functionality in a market for size.”
Mark Badyra, CEO, Appital, commented: “We have experienced a period of accelerated growth since Appital Insights went live in September 2023 and we introduced several workflow and functionality enhancements. We have now reached a critical mass, as a significant number of large asset managers are onboarded and our platform liquidity has surged in recent months. We are very excited about the collaboration with POSIT and Virtu Financial; it represents yet another milestone in our mission to bring innovation to equity capital markets.”
Appital launched Price Discovery in Appital Insights
Last week, Appital introduced a new functionality designed to stimulate natural liquidity among the firm’s buy-side clients and discover pricing dynamics on larger ADV orders on their pad. The provider of peer-to-peer price discovery and liquidity sourcing technology for asset managers is launching Price Discovery in Appital Insights.
