The Securities Lending market is large — “with more than $2.7 trillion in assets on loan as of 2021 and revenue of $5.45 billion, an increase of 19% year over year,” according to an update shared with CI.
Its major function of “facilitating lending and borrowing of securities collateral” is key to Clear Street’s business.
Specifically, before someone can sell a security short, they need to “locate” the inventory required “to place the sell order in the market.”
With this in mind, Clear Street has launched its platform ATLAS (Automated Trading Locates Allocation System), which is “a proprietary trading system that allocates stock loan inventory to incoming customer requests.”
With ATLAS, customers can:
- Submit locate orders directly from their Order Management System via Clear Street’s FIX interface, or use its web portal;
- Use Clear Street’s fully automated ReST API to programmatically submit locate requests, making it ideal for quantitative trading strategies and robo-advisors;
- Maintain a unified view of all incoming locate requests; and
- Utilize a new platform that provides a modern user experience with improved probability of customer requests being satisfied, especially when supply is tight.
Launched in 2018 by industry veterans, Clear Street is “a financial technology company building better infrastructure for capital markets.”
Clear Street’s first product is “its cloud-based prime brokerage platform, which provides clients everything they need to trade U.S. equities and options.”
Future products will “expand across geographies, asset classes, and be available to all market participants, including fintechs, market makers, and professional traders.”
Clear Street’s cloud-native infrastructure “is flexible, scalable, secure, and reliable.”
Clear Street clients are able “to trade sooner and smarter—processing more than $3 billion in trades every day.”
As covered in May 2022, Clear Street, a Fintech building better access to capital markets, announced the completion of a $165 million Series B round “to accelerate launching its platform.”
The investment round was led by Prysm Capital, LLC, a growth equity firm that partners with disruptive companies in the technology, consumer, and healthcare sector.
Additional investors “included NextGen Venture Partners, Walleye Capital, Belvedere, NEAR Foundation, McLaren Strategic Ventures, and Validus Growth Investors, as well as angel investors, Illia Polosukhin (founder of NEAR), Moses Lo (founder of Xendit), and Alastair Trueger (Event Horizon Ventures).”