Trading, risk and analytics technology provider LightPoint Financial Technology (LightPoint) has completed a Series A funding round led by The Citco Group of Companies, and Ares Management.
TAP Advisors advised LightPoint on the transaction and will take a Board Observer seat.
Michael Arougheti, Chief Executive Officer and President of Ares Management, has been appointed as a board member and will be joined by Citco’s Head of Fund Services, Jay Peller, who will provide strategic consulting and insight into future product development to build upon Citco’s domain knowledge of fund servicing and alternative investment operations.
These board member additions add to a management team which includes both veteran Wall Street fund managers and seasoned technology business professionals.
“We are delighted to have Citco and Ares as strategic investors, and we believe their support reflects the significant value that our technology provides for our clients. Managers are increasingly realising the rising costs and diminishing returns of in-house platforms,” says Patrick Hughes, CEO of LightPoint. “Our technology solutions are built with one thing in mind – supporting managers and their alpha-generating activities.”
The LightPoint Platform provides a fully integrated, scalable cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution designed by front-end users for front-end users and built by engineers to scale. Its cloud-agnostic structure supports entire workflows, including portfolio management, trade execution, settlement, compliance, reconciliation, finance, risk, administration and client reporting. Users have a unique capability of analysing their collective data to meet the technological challenges of increased regulatory, compliance and investor demands, while staying protected by state-of-art cybersecurity architecture. The LightPoint platform additionally provides a bi-directional API that allows platform integration with custom and third-party software.
“We have innovated a new business architecture that sees our comprehensive and highly-configurable trading and risk workflow sit on top of an extensible bi-temporal cross-asset book-of-record (BOR) core. This provides managers with a one-stop solution for accessing their data and running analyses,” says Brant Arseneau (pictured), President of LightPoint.
“With our deep experience, global footprint, and wide range of business relationships, Citco has a unique perspective on our industry’s needs. We are happy to extend support to LightPoint and very much look forward to a continued relationship of growth,” says Jay Peller.
“LightPoint provides a great solution to tackle some of our industry’s most pressing concerns, and we continue to support the platform’s significant growth potential,” says Michael Arougheti. “We believe LightPoint’s enhanced flexibility and comprehensive front-to-back technologies meaningfully enhance asset managers’ ability to expand their scalability and efficiency.”
LightPoint will continue to innovate its platform’s capabilities, constantly improving its modules and expanding into new offerings while applying new proven technologies. Currently, LightPoint aims to leverage its distributed-ledger-technology (DLT) capabilities and transform the core book-of-records into a shared ledger which would be distributed to a trading community. The use of a shared ledger will eliminate many laborious processes and costs, thereby reducing operating risks and costs for their clients and the entire trading community.
