First Day of Dealings

RNS Number : 5241X

Beeks Financial Cloud Group PLC

27 November 2017

 

27 November 2017

Beeks Financial Cloud Group plc

("Beeks", "the Company", or "the Group")

Admission to Trading on AIM and First Day of Dealings

Beeks Financial Cloud Group plc (AIM: BKS), a niche cloud computing and connectivity provider for financial markets, is pleased to announce its admission to trading on AIM at 8:00 a.m. today ("Admission"). Dealings in the ordinary shares will trade under the ticker ("BKS") (ISN: GB00BZ0X8W18).

The Company has successfully raised a total of £7 million through a placing of 9,000,000 new ordinary shares and the sale by existing shareholders of 5,000,000 ordinary shares at a placing price of 50p (the "Placing").

The proceeds of the Placing will enable the Company to accelerate growth and take advantage of new opportunities within the existing Beeks' business. The Directors intend to enter new geographical markets by adding additional data centres around the world, increase WAN capacity, and add more cross connects between brokers and trading venues. Additionally, the Company will continue to enhance its self-service web portal and provide additional value added services to generate additional revenue from existing clients and attract new customers. The Company also intends to progress existing and new bolt-on and strategic acquisition opportunities.

Further information on the Company, including Beeks' Admission Document, is available on the Company's website www.beeksfinancialcloud.com.

Cenkos Securities plc is acting as nominated adviser and broker to the Company.

Gordon McArthur, CEO of Beeks Financial Cloud, commented, "We are delighted to be joining AIM today in what marks a significant milestone for the Company. As a growing technology provider for automated trading, we believe that public company status and the new funds raised will enable us to accelerate our clear organic and acquisitive growth strategy.

"On behalf of the Board we would like to thank our clients, employees and shareholders for their support and we are excited about the prospects that lie ahead."

The Company has 49,000,000 ordinary shares of 0.125 pence each in issue following Admission. This figure may be used by shareholders as the denominator for the calculation by which they determine if they are required to notify their interest in, or a change of their interest in, the Company under the FCA's Disclosure Guidance and Transparency Rules.

For further information please contact:

Beeks Financial Cloud Group plc
Gordon McArthur, CEO	via Alma PR
Simon Goulding, CFO
Cenkos Securities plc	[phone]
Derrick Lee / Beth McKiernan
Alma PR	[phone]
Josh Royston / Hilary Buchanan / Helena Bogle

ABOUT BEEKS FINANCIAL CLOUD

Beeks Financial Cloud is a UK-based low-latency service provider for automated (also known as algorithmic) trading in Forex and Futures financial products. With nine data centres globally and low-latency connectivity between sites, Beeks Financial Cloud focuses on reducing barriers to entry and time to market for institutional clients trading forex/futures. For more information, visit: www.beeksfinancialcloud.com.

Background to the Company

Connecting and managing low latency environments is complex and time consuming to establish, as well as expensive to maintain. Mid-tier institutions are unlikely to be able to build the infrastructure and make the connections required themselves and many choose Beeks to manage their automated trading routes for them. By choosing Beeks as a service provider, financial institutions can reduce IT overheads in their business and trade in a variety of markets and test and deploy new strategies without significant cost or down-time. Beeks can cater for the requirements of these traders from a cloud based platform, allowing them to trade on a ''pay for what you use'' model.

 The Group is headquartered in Glasgow and operates from nine operating datacentre locations in London, New Jersey, Chicago, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Each is connected via a dedicated fibre network and Beeks has connections to various Financial Exchanges including CME and CBOE and a number of Trading Venues. The Company employs 28 people across the UK, US, Austria, and Japan and engages seven contractors in Indonesia, one in the USA and one in Japan.

Automated Trading

In algorithmic or automated trading, computers directly interface with trading platforms, placing orders without immediate human intervention. The computers observe market data and other information or factors, and based on a built-in algorithm, send back trading instructions, often within milliseconds.

Forex Market

Automated trading is used for a variety of asset classes, including the Forex market. Forex trading is used to speculate on the relative strength of one currency against another. It is a decentralised, largely electronic market with no central exchange or one physical location and is a 24 hour market on the global working week, moving around the world as the business day begins from Tokyo to London to New York. This allows a trader to close or manage their trades at any time of the day. Foreign trade, which is undertaken by companies buying and selling products in foreign countries or converting profits from foreign sales into domestic currency, accounts for only about 5 per cent. of the global daily turnover, with 95 per cent. coming from speculation for profit.

Futures Market

Since 2015, Beeks has also provided Infrastructure-as-a-Service ("IaaS") to traders in the Futures market. Futures market participants trade in contracts that represent claims to a certain currency type and a specific price per unit. Typical futures contracts are bought and sold based upon a standard size and settlement date on public commodities markets. Beeks has connections to several major Futures market locations, and is an approved service provider to CME Group, which runs four exchanges including CME, the world's largest Futures market place.

The number of participants, locations and velocity of the market make the provision of trading infrastructure for the Forex and Futures markets especially well suited to the cloud computing model.

Strategy

Beeks is an established and growing business with strong relationships and a reliable client base. It has invested in its core infrastructure so that it can scale its business up significantly on its current operational asset base.

The Group's strategy is to grow the institutional business in Forex and Futures, both organically and through acquisitions. The Company and Directors have proven their ability to organically grow the customer base and make successful acquisitions.

The Directors believe that organic growth can be achieved through enhancing and upgrading Beeks' self-service web portal, which sets the Group apart from other so-called cloud providers of Trading Software, and by adding further services which could be provided from Beeks' existing platform or via acquisition and would enable the Company to generate additional revenues from existing clients and attract new customers. Additional services may include data feeds from additional Trading Venues, data normalisation (where data from Trading Venues is collated and packaged), cloud data recovery and additional connectivity offerings.

The Directors believe that the fragmented nature of Beeks' sector will create acquisition opportunities, both bolt-on and strategic, to complement organic growth opportunities.  

Furthermore, the Directors believe that there is the potential for growth to be accelerated by way of an initial public offering on AIM.

Board

Mark Cubitt (Non-Executive Chairman)

Mark has extensive multinational experience gained over the last 33 years, including 21 years in the PLC environment and eight years as chief financial officer at Wolfson Microelectronics plc until its sale to Cirrus Logic in August 2014. Mark is currently a non-executive director of private company RHA Technologies Ltd based in Glasgow and is also a retained advisor to PureLifi based in Edinburgh. Previously Mark was non-executive chairman of Superglass Holdings plc and was part of the team that turned round the business before its sale in 2016. He also served as VP of finance at Jacobs Engineering and was finance director of Babtie Group until the sale of the company to Jacobs Engineering in 2004, when he then took up a wider finance role with Jacobs. Mark has also worked at Denholm Oilfield Services Limited, Dawson International PLC, Christian Salvesen PLC and its then subsidiary Aggreko Plc.

Mark is a Chartered Accountant and has a degree in Accountancy and Computer Science from Heriot-Watt University and was the winner of the Scottish Finance Director of the Year in 2005 and is a past chairman of the Scottish Finance Directors Discussion Group.

Gordon McArthur (Chief Executive Officer)

Gordon McArthur founded Beeks in 2010 having become increasingly frustrated by the lack of low latency trading infrastructure available. He has since grown the business from a three man start up to its current, profitable form. Gordon's career in software and IT solutions businesses spans 19 years during which time he has held commercial and managerial roles at IBM and Versko, an IT specialist for IBM software platforms. During his time at IBM Gordon worked in both financial services and the industrial sector and initially on SME businesses but latterly covering IBM's largest globally integrated accounts in the Oil and Gas sector.

Gordon has a BA (Hons) in Risk Management and a Masters in Business Information Management from Glasgow Caledonian University.

Simon Mark Goulding (Chief Financial Officer)

Simon Goulding is a Chartered Accountant with over 25 years' experience in finance, management and consultancy. Having commenced his career at KPMG, Simon has held finance and senior management roles at Arthur Anderson, Deloitte Consulting, Blandy & Blandy LLP and Campbell Dallas LLP. Simon first worked with Beeks in 2012 whilst running his own consulting business, and joined on a permanent basis in December 2015.

Simon is a Chartered Accountant and has a BComm (Acc) from the University of Birmingham.

Christopher Brian Livesey (Non-Executive Director)

Chris Livesey is SVP and General Manager of Mainframe Products at Micro Focus, a global software company delivering and supporting enterprise software solutions that help clients innovate faster with lower risk. Chris has 25 years' experience in the software industry, having held several senior sales and marketing leadership positions in global companies such as IBM, Rational Software and Softlab Limited.

Chris has a BSc (Hons) in Statistics and a Postgraduate Diploma in Computing Science from the University of Glasgow.

Andrew William Crawford Meldrum (Non-Executive Director)

Will Meldrum is SVP and Chief of Staff at IHS Markit, a world leader in critical information and data analytics. Prior to joining Markit in 2005, Will worked at Deutsche Bank for four years managing the bank's interests across a portfolio of investments with a key focus on industry consortia, electronic trading systems and data.

Will holds an MA from Edinburgh University and an MBA from London Business School.

 

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