Rosenblatt’s Banking Team Recognized Again by Institutional Investor

November 2018

We’re proud to share the news that Rosenblatt’s head of Fintech Investment Banking, Vikas Shah, has been selected once again to Institutional Investor's Fintech Finance 40, climbing four spots in the annual ranking. 

Recognition of our continued momentum in Fintech is particularly gratifying and more meaningful as we reflect on the road to get here over the last ten years. 

It was a decade ago, long before Fintech became fashionable, that we launched Rosenblatt’s investment-banking business, combining the ‘tech geek’ and ‘market structure geek’ elements of the firm’s DNA. As a firm, we had always embraced automation as a means of survival in the rapidly evolving equity trading world, from pioneering the idea of electronic direct market access (DMA) when we put the first NYSE DOT terminal on a buy-side desk way back in 1989 to being an early adopter of cloud computing to facilitate tick database storage supporting the range of analytics offerings we utilize on our agency trading desk and share with clients. We believed then as we do now that the impact of technology on the way business is done on both Wall Street and financial services on Main Street would only intensify. This belief and interest, combined with the firm’s groundbreaking work helping investors understand market structure and the exchange industry, was a catalyst for our entry into the Fintech business.

 With incumbents, new entrants and investors all having a need to understand each other’s worlds, our annual Financial Technologies Summit became a place where they could meet and make that happen, when we hosted our inaugural event in New York City in 2009. We began leveraging our domain expertise and relationships, facilitating capital-raising and m&a for these market participants. Given our history, unsurprisingly, exchanges, trading firms and capital markets technologies were the initial focus, but over the years we have advised companies across the full gamut of fin tech companies from robo-advisory, alternative lending and payments to AI/machine learning, crypto and block chain and data/analytics/indexing. A complete list of transactions and more information about the firm’s investment-banking practice is available here.

 What’s next for Rosenblatt in Fintech? Put simply, it’s our largest area of investment as we look for new ways to add value in the Fintech ecosystem. We are investing in more content to keep market participants informed, such as thematic reports and coverage of fin tech companies from our exchanges and fin tech analyst Ken Hill, as well as observations from market structure analyst Valerie Bogard. Importantly, we plan to grow our content analyzing private Fintech companies, a vibrant area of innovation whose market coverage remains spotty, at best. We are also increasingly finding that many of the Fintech companies we work with have technologies that have applications far beyond the financials services vertical. Given this reality and the domain expertise we have developed in technology, media & telecom (TMT) from a fundamental research perspective, expanding our Fintech banking effort into TMT more broadly is a natural next step for our team.

 Stay tuned…

#CapitalMarkets #Payments #PersonalFinance #WealthManagement #InsurTech #AlternativeLending #RegTech #Crypto #DLT #Blockchain #Exchanges #AI #MachineLearning #RoboAdvisor