The Taurus founding team wants to further expand its fintech with fresh money.
Zürich The banking service provider Taurus, which specializes in digital assets, raises CHF 65 million in a Series B financing round. With this step, investors enable a start-up to exit the development stage.
The Geneva-based fintech around the co-founders Lamine Brahimi, Sébastien Dessimoz, Oren-Olivier Puder and Jean-Philippe Aumasson has attracted prominent financiers from the financial sector, as the company announced on Tuesday. Credit Suisse is leading the round of financing. Deutsche Bank and Geneva-based private bank Pictet have also invested.
Taurus has positioned itself as a technology service provider for banks that want to offer their customers access to cryptocurrencies and digital assets. At the same time, Taurus operates a trading platform for digital securities regulated by the Swiss financial regulator Finma.
strategic partnership
André Helfenstein, CEO of Credit Suisse in Switzerland, described the strategic partnership with Taurus as an important cornerstone of the major bank’s digital strategy: “We continue to rely on new and innovative technologies and plan to soon offer our customers several services in the field of digital assets can offer, both on the issuer side and on the investment side.”
Banks can use Taurus not only to process and store their customers’ investments in Bitcoin, Ether and Co. You can also place tokenized securities there, such as company shares. The shares are issued digitally outside of the normal stock exchanges in the form of so-called tokens.
The platform is supposed to use the fresh capital now be further expanded. Lamine Brahimi, co-founder of Taurus, calculates for the Handelsblatt that there are around 10,000 listed companies worldwide – but in Switzerland alone there are half a million companies outside of the capital markets. “We want to focus on this market.”
The Taurus co-founder is convinced: “There are many companies that remain private, but also want to benefit from the tokenization of their shares.” The Taurus Digital Exchange (TDX) offers an opportunity to trade these shares.
Credit Suisse recently brought an operator of alpine resorts to the digital trading platform. The Geneva-based private bank Cité Gestion had its own shares listed on the TDX. Brahimi says, “Buying and selling stocks should be as easy as buying a book on Amazon.”
Swiss stock exchange lists blockchain bonds
The Swiss stock exchange Six is also promoting the issue and trading of digital securities with its SDX platform. Recently, the city of Lugano and the major bank UBS issued blockchain bonds listed on the SDX.
“Using distributed ledger technology, the security can be traded and sold on the SDX in real time,” says a Six spokesman. “This has the advantage that the counterparty risk for the buyer of the digital security is eliminated.”
The Swiss stock exchange operator founded its digital platform in 2018 and invested a lot of money. The Six has adjusted the business model several times over the course of the year. Instead of offering Swiss banks access to Bitcoin, Etherum and Co. via a regulated trading venue, as originally planned, the focus is now on issuing, trading and securely storing digital securities.
“The technology can also be applied to non-traditional securities, such as spin-offs, private market placements or project financing,” says the Six spokesman. “This can be well supplemented with our offer for medium-sized companies.” SDX recently listed tokenized shares of the fintech F10.
The Swiss stock exchange Six with the digital offshoot SDX is thus increasingly pushing into a market that the Geneva-based fintech Taurus already occupies. “Custody of digital assets for our customers is at the core of our technology business,” says co-founder Brahimi. “In Switzerland we have a market share of around 60 percent.” Taurus would be reluctant to cede this to SDX without a fight.
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