Hello, we are Tokenovate!

March 13, 2023

Hello, and welcome to the Tokenovate blog. We are a UK-based software company active in the financial services market. We provide distributed financial market infrastructure, enabling programmatic lifecycle event management of the pre-trade to post-trade workflow for OTC and Exchange traded derivatives. Our vision is to operate at the heart of the next generation distributed market financial infrastructure by pioneering the adoption of programmatic lifecycle event management for derivative trading. 

But how did we end up here?

It all started a long time ago… Almost 20 years ago in fact when our co-founders Richard and Gerard worked together in the telecoms market. Even though they eventually pursued different professional paths, they always remained in touch. 

In 2010, Richard created ClearTrade Exchange, a regulated futures market offering a global electronic market platform for commodities. In 2016, ClearTrade was acquired by European Energy Exchange AG, a Deutsche Börse Group Company, and Richard ventured out into new adventures. But he never completely lost touch with the derivatives market. 

At the same time, Gerard was running his own business, being operationally responsible for multi-billion pound projects across multiple markets, including Royal Bank of Scotland, HMRC, Vodafone, BP (to name just a few).  

For the last few years, ISDA has embarked on an ambitious project to standardise, digitise and automate how derivatives are traded and managed across the trade lifecycle. The ISDA Common Domain Model was born. 

Simultaneously, Blockchain technology has travelled on a remarkable journey, enabling an impressive development of innovative new solutions suitable for the financial market.

So when Richard and Gerard came together again in 2021, they realised that these two parallel developments had opened up an opportunity to solve a problem they both felt passionate about: to improve operational efficiency for the derivatives market. The idea behind Tokenovate was born.

Over the course of the next months (and years hopefully!) we will cover a wide variety of topics in this blog that hopefully will help you understand what we are doing, what exciting opportunities and developments are taking place in our market, and perhaps also one or two surprises. Thank you for reading!

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