Laurence Fletcher, Deputy Markets News Editor at the Financial Times, profiles The International Stock Exchange (TISE) as one of the FT's Reinvention Champions 2024.  

Named as the winner of the Banking and Finance category in this year's FT Reinvention Champions series, Fletcher notes that the Channel Islands based stock exchange — which has for years specialised in providing a listing venue for corporate debt — last year launched a unit, TISE Private Markets, allowing private companies to run auctions in their own shares, without the need for a broker.

This move comes as more companies choose to remain privately owned for longer, rather than trying to float on a stock exchange. Helped by a glut of capital in private markets, many executives have opted to keep more control over their firm’s direction and to avoid the extra scrutiny and regulatory burdens that come with an initial public offering of shares.

“I think there’s much more demand to stay private, not to be too exposed, not to have too much costs,” TISE’s CEO Cees Vermaas told the Financial Times.

The Channel Islands “is an ideal breeding ground for private markets”, he added, pointing to the many family office investors and funds regulated there.

Mr Vermaas said that TISE is much better placed to take advantage of the huge boom in private assets that has taken place over the past decade or so. Unlike a public stock exchange, its new private markets facility allows a company to decide who can and cannot buy its shares. 

"TISE is much better placed to take advantage of the huge boom in private assets that has taken place over the past decade or so."

The article also highlights that last year, TISE announced that its first private market client was garden centre group Blue Diamond. TISE is already in the process of bringing on board two other private companies and hopes to have 50 companies using its platform over the next five years. These could benefit from not only using the share trading facility but also by listing bonds, in order to raise money.

Fletcher goes on to note that TISE is also in talks with a number of closed-end funds and which are seen as an opportunity to use tokenisation technology to help facilitate a secondary market in them.

He also speaks with industry insiders who agree that the potential for private market exchanges is huge.

The article was written by Laurence Fletcher and published in the Financial Times, November 2024.

The full article is available from the FT website.