London Stock Exchange expands its services
LSEG, which owns the London Stock Exchange, closed a deal to buy TORA Trading. The acquisition amounted to $325 million. TORA is a British developer of a cloud trading platform. The closing of the deal will take place after regulatory approval.
TORA has been on the market since 2004 and provides clients with a system for managing orders, and tracking their execution. In addition, it offers an extended portfolio of services for clients who trade stocks, currencies, fixed-income securities, and digital assets.
Representatives of the London Stock Exchange say that the acquisition of TORA is an important step for the development of the company. The deal will strengthen the exchange’s position in the cryptocurrency market, due to the growing interest in this segment from institutional investors. In addition, now LSEG will be able to expand the map of its services, going beyond Europe. TORA successfully operates in North American regions and European and Asian countries. Thus, customers of the London Stock Exchange will be able to work with new types of assets, thereby diversifying their portfolios. After the deal, TORA will enter the structure of LSEG, which is engaged in data processing and analytics.
The stock exchange in London offers its customers 50% of all companies in the world. That is why it is considered the most international. In addition, the exchange is considered one of the oldest and largest in the world, and the level of trust in it is extremely high among investors from different countries.
The purchase of the company is another indicator of how fast the cryptocurrency industry is developing. According to data from PwC, last year, mergers and acquisitions totaled $55 billion. In 2020, the figure was more than $1 billion. Thus, the number of deals increased by almost 5 thousand percent.
PwC notes that compared with 2021, the average size of the check mergers and acquisitions increased from almost 53 million to 180 million dollars. This indicator was achieved thanks to large deals, the amount of which exceeded $1 billion. There were about 10 such deals.
In terms of geography, most purchases were made in North and South America, the share of this region is 51% of the total. A total of 393 deals were made. However, the maximum amount falls on Africa, European countries, and the Middle East – $25.5 billion.
Companies in the cryptocurrency market attracted more than $34 billion last year, which went through 1,552 deals. In 2020, the figure for 616 transactions was almost $5 billion.