BNP Paribas Securities Services and SmartAngels, a crowdfunding platform for startups and growing SMEs, have signed a strategic partnership centred on blockchain technology.
How does it work? BNP Paribas Securities Services will create a digital ledger of transactions using blockchain, enabling securities issued by SmartAngels’s client companies to be recorded automatically. Investors buying these securities will have their payments processed immediately and e-certificates will be forwarded instantaneously. Financial transactions conducted via the platform will therefore be executed in a way that’s simplified, fast, secure and cheap.
The standardisation and security of transactions by BNP Paribas Securities Services via blockchain will make it possible for more investors to trade securities directly on the SmartAngels platform, thus creating a secondary market for SmartAngels’s client companies. This will provide investors with liquidity, a matter that has not so far been successfully addressed in the crowdfunding sector.
This partnership should help improve the access of startups and growing SMEs to finance. SmartAngels is thus reinforcing the professionalisation of crowdfunding.
“Today, there are only a few thousand listed companies in the European financial markets. Integrating blockchain into crowdfunding platforms will enable hundreds of thousands of startups and growing SMEs to obtain financing quickly and cheaply from individuals and professional investors”, explains Benoit Bazzocchi, the founder of SmartAngels.
The pilot project is expected to launch during the second half of 2016.
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