Aurigin: Pioneering fintech equips Investment Banks for Covid-era

New York based Aurigin (formerly BankerBay), the largest M&A platform in the world with over USD 250 billion of live, curated deals, is rolling out a business solution that no bank can afford to ignore.

Aurigin is announcing “AiB,” an enterprise solution designed to address the increasing needs of investment banks and their clients by digitizing the end-to-end process, from deal origination all the way to deal execution, in an integrated platform. Since its inception in 2014, Aurigin has been at the forefront of digital transformation in the investment banking industry and cites current global conditions as a table-thumping call to action.

“Investment banking has been ripe for modernization for decades, but long-standing traditions and a stubborn resistance to change have kept those brick-and-mortar forts intact during a tsunami of industrial digitization. Now due to Covid, banks simply have to act,” says Romesh Jayawickrama, Aurigin’s CEO and Founder.

Historically, investment banks have tended to tackle operational problems by adding or taking away people. These are neither long term nor scalable solutions. Aurigin’s core principle is that high-cost human capital should only be used for high-value tasks, and technology should handle all the time-consuming heavy lifting. Although an obvious philosophy to adhere to, very few banks seem to live by this. The company estimates adoption of their technology can reduce man-hours in key areas by as much as 80%, reduce the time to market by 50% and reduce costs by 70%.

How it works – Aurigin’s existing business model uses a proprietary algo-engine to rapidly and precisely connect companies seeking capital with institutions providing capital anywhere around the world. This technology has been extended further to deliver an enterprise solution for banks that digitizes the entire process, from the first loan a bank deploys to a company, to any equity capital raise and M&A, all the way to an IPO. AiB bridges the gaps between relevant divisions of a bank, whereby either clients or automated analyses will notify the most appropriate division of a bank of potential capital requirements. The platform then triggers the relevant process chain. This includes building marketing material, populating data rooms and matching the capital requirement with internal or external sources of funds via Aurigin’s global ecosystem of investors. AiB provides digitized solutions for the clients, the banks and for any external investors.

“Banks’ operating models are just too heavy. They are having to turn away billions of dollars of business because the unit costs of execution are too high. The need of the hour is to use technology to streamline processes, minimising those unit costs, increasing scalability and adding revenue streams to existing business lines,” Jayawickrama says.

Covid has magnified existing problems for investment banks, to such a level that digital transformation is a strategic imperative across front, middle and back offices. Aurigin brings a long-term and scalable solution that will help transform the industry.