Cobalt Acquired by United Fintech
Posted by Colin Lambert. Last updated: December 15, 2022
Post-trade and credit risk solution provider Cobalt has become the fifth firm to be acquired by United Fintech in the last two years. It joins FairXchange, TTMZero, Athena Systems and NetDania and in the stable.
Cobalt was founded in 2015, and provides core shared ledger infrastructure for banks in FX trading and digital assets. The company’s platform leverages blockchain-derived concepts to create a “golden copy”, a single, shared view, of every transaction and remove the need for reconciliation across silos and multiple systems, thus mitigating credit risk and cost efficiently.
Cobalt’s current customer base includes top tier banks like Deutsche Bank, Citi Bank, Barclays, BNP, Natwest, ABN Amro and Standard Chartered Bank. Several banks including Citi and Standard Chartered were early investors in Cobalt.
United Fintech will onboard Cobalt, its clients and employees onto its platform while Cobalt will continue to operate as a standalone company under United Fintech. United Fintech CEO and founder, Christian Frahm, will be appointed as the new chairman of Cobalt and Cobalt’s co-founder and chief product officer Andrew Coyne and CEO Darren Coote will continue to lead the business day to day.
“It is incredibly exciting to welcome some of the financial industry’s accomplished leaders to the United Fintech family,” says Frahm. “Cobalt is at the forefront of critical institutional trade infrastructure for foreign exchange and digital assets, leading the field in innovation that empowers banks to keep pace with the ever-evolving capital markets.
“Foreign Exchange is a core part of a bank’s infrastructure today,” he continues. “In the future I’m convinced digital assets will become a key asset class in the sophisticated money management space, while financial institutions and banks will need a high level of expertise and know-how to thrive in the coming digital banking era. Cobalt’s technology is a great addition to the United Fintech global range of products and services and I look forward to the new phase of our growth journey together.”
Coyne adds, “[United Fintech] will help us accelerate shared infrastructure adoption for the benefit of all market participants. This will allow our clients to access markets more efficiently, with better control and lower cost.”
