West Realm Shires Inc. (FTX US) recently announced the acquisition of Embed Financial Technologies Inc., including its wholly-owned subsidiary Embed Clearing LLC, a FINRA, DTC, NSCC, Nasdaq, and IEX member clearing firm.
Embed specializes in “providing whitelabel brokerage services and APIs to broker-dealers and registered investment advisors.”
The acquisition is anticipated “to close, pending satisfaction of customary closing conditions and regulatory approval.”
The price of the acquisition will “not be disclosed.”
FTX US President, Brett Harrison, commented:
“As I mentioned when we launched FTX Stocks, our new equities and ETF trading platform, our goal at FTX is to provide a comprehensive trading application that spans all asset classes. For equities and options trading this necessarily includes services such as clearing and custody, and our partnership with Embed showed us that they have built excellent technology and infrastructure to provide these services. We’re looking forward to working together to integrate both our teams and our technology as we continue to build FTX Stocks.”
The acquisition signals the firm’s intention “to expand the financial services it offers to US customers, and will enable it to route, execute, clear, and custody all customer equities and options accounts and trades through use of Embed’s infrastructure and licensure.”
In addition, Embed and FTX US share a common goal “to provide whitelabel brokerage services to other businesses, applications, and customers.”
Founder & CEO of Embed, Michael Giles, said:
“When we originally began working with the FTX US team as their clearing partner, we soon realized how similar our respective cultures were. Our teams have a shared vision and dedication to building from the ground up to democratize access to financial services, and Embed’s latest securities technology is the ideal complimentary to FTX’s leading crypto solutions. This combination enables the combined group to bring an industry-leading securities and crypto solution to market, which was previously sorely lacking, for the benefit of FTX US customers and exciting new B2B clients.”
FTX Stocks is currently available “for select customers in private beta and will be made available to all domestic customers of FTX US later this summer.”
As covered, FTX US is a US-regulated cryptocurrency exchange, “built from the ground up.”
Its mission is for FTX US “to grow the digital currency ecosystem, offer US and international traders a platform that inspires their loyalty, and to become a market-leading US-regulated cryptocurrency exchange.”
Brokerage services offered by FTX US are “provided by FTX Capital Markets LLC, which is an affiliated broker-dealer registered with the SEC and member FINRA/SIPC.”
Custody, execution and clearing services for securities are “provided by Embed Clearing LLC, an independent registered broker-dealer and member FINRA/SIPC.”