Passionate about change. Passionate about our customers.

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

In 2010, Richard created the Cleartrade Exchange, a regulated futures market offering a global electronic market platform for commodities. In 2016, Cleartrade was acquired by the 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 company, being operationally responsible for multi-billion pound projects across multiple markets, with customers including Royal Bank of Scotland, HMRC, Vodafone and 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 (CDM) was born.

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.