Syndex brings new efficiency and transparency to the private capital markets

Syndex is at the forefront of innovation in the private capital markets space. The New Zealand-based company manages a growing online marketplace for investment in assets like agriculture, horticulture, commercial property, technology and private equity. 

While these assets have often been out of reach for many investors, Syndex has brought them into the mainstream, just as interest in alternative assets is soaring and they are seen as part of a balanced portfolio. Introducing a higher level of activity and liquidity into the market has made it easier for investors to buy and sell these proportional-owned investments. Meanwhile,  streamlining of trading and administration processes have benefited the issuing party or investment manager. 

Salesforce keeps the markets’ wheels turning, automating the share registry functionality and allowing issuers to enhance their investor relations. It has also helped Syndex to scale beyond its home market and capture opportunities in Australia and beyond.

While proportionally-owned investments are not new, the typical lack of transparency and tradability made them unpopular with investors. Syndex needed to gain their trust by offering a contemporary, efficient, and easy-to-use service. 

“We had to build a marketplace quickly, which was really challenging given the many complexities. Salesforce provided all the mechanisms and scale to do the job, and was really attractive from a security perspective,” said Jenkins.

Jenkins added that the security provided by Salesforce has been even more valuable than predicted. 

“Knowing that everything runs on Salesforce gives our customers a general level of confidence. And when it comes to sales, we don’t need to have long conversations about security. We just point them to the Salesforce Trust website which provides answers to customers’ questions,” said Jenkins. 

Leveraging Salesforce, Syndex has created a platform for everything from proportionally-owned asset listings to the exchange of shares on a peer-to-peer basis - giving investors access to liquidity. 

Many of the platform’s features are underpinned by Heroku. The Salesforce Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provides everything Syndex needs to build and run bespoke software solutions. It also allows it to run multiple trading events running concurrently. Heroku syncs data between these solutions and Salesforce and automatically scales to support peak trading volumes. 

“Heroku is ideal for our business as it allows us to run each market in its own secure container and automatically dial up capacity based on demand,” said Jenkins. 

The data generated by these markets is further protected by OwnBackup from the Salesforce AppExchange that automates daily backups and offers rapid recovery.

Syndex is a game changer for private businesses like niche issuers and co-ops that want to raise capital to unlock future growth. It provides a comprehensive back-end to manage the issue of these assets while opening the door to a whole new community of investors. 

Heroku and the Salesforce Platform help Syndex facilitate shareholder verification, information disclosure, and checks and balances for Anti-Money Laundering validation. The Salesforce Platform also automates reporting and workflows, helping to cut administration workload by as much as 50%.

Salesforce additionally supports investor engagement with Sales Cloud providing a complete view of investor data which can be used to tailor communication and support. 

“Salesforce has helped us to deliver unbelievable efficiency to the private capital markets while also addressing gaps in transparency and investor engagement,” said Jenkins. “It has also enabled us to scale and bring new issuers onto our platform quickly.”

Since its launch in 2015, Syndex has evolved to support over 35 issuers, running more than 400 issues with a market value of US$4.5bn, and more than 19,000 investor accounts. It has also expanded into the Australian market where it provides an attractive offering to the country’s many co-operative businesses and continuous issuers.

Interest in private markets has increased in recent years and Syndex has responded with new innovations for investors and issuers. The first is a recent addition to their liquidity offering; a periodic secondary market built on Heroku that allows investors to resell their securities in a timed event. This complements the existing continuous market allowing Syndex to offer liquidity mechanisms for every kind of issuer. 

The second—soon to be launched—is a solution that makes it easy for issuers to launch new investment offers in multiple markets or jurisdictions at once. Also built on Heroku, the solution automates what has traditionally been a very manual process to ensure compliance in each market. 

“Typically if an issuer wants to enter a new market, they must find a local distributor and the costs of set up and management can be prohibitive. What we’ve built with Heroku solves this challenge, opening up a massive opportunity for us and our stakeholders,” said Jenkins.