BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Trellis Software Inc., a Boston-based company that helps issuers and fiduciaries navigate the time-consuming and cumbersome private investment process with its innovative digital platform, announced today that it has partnered with ClearList. ClearList is a digital trading platform created to transform price discovery of private company securities and provide liquidity for those securities. The Trellis platform will be used to manage investor onboarding, KYC, document management and other regulatory processes.
ClearList is majority-owned by GTS, a leading electronic market maker across global financial instruments, as well as the largest Designated Market Maker at the New York Stock Exchange and the largest wholesale market maker of over-the-counter securities in the United States.
Bill White, CEO of ClearList said, “ClearList enables opportunities for private companies at every stage of growth and capital management, helping define the path to the public markets. With the Trellis platform of services, we are going to bring efficiencies of the public markets to the private securities marketplace, for both issuers and investors.”
Trellis Software is a SaaS platform built to facilitate secure, compliant, and paperless investment in alternative assets from deal sourcing and due diligence through subscription, custody, and monitoring. With the relationship announced today, this platform will now facilitate liquidity for private investments through the ClearList digital trading platform. This end-to-end transactional engine, from issuer through fiduciary, investor and ultimately liquidity provider is a first-of-its-kind offering in the private investment space.
“Investments in private securities are expected to surpass those in hedge funds sometime in the next three years,” said Tim Krochuk, CEO of Trellis and a Managing Member of Shepherd Kaplan Krochuk, LLC. “That poses a real problem for fiduciaries, especially in the wealth management space. Getting access to deal flow and managing the cumbersome investment process involved in making those investments will be a real drain on the resources of any firm. ClearList helps solve that problem.”
“The illiquid nature of private investments forces many investors to make smaller investments in a larger basket of deals, which compounds this problem,” added Cliff Friedman, the Chairman/CEO of ShareNett Holdings, LLC. ShareNett, a Trellis affiliate, connects and empowers its members-only network of 400+ family offices and ultra-high-net-worth individuals around the world with unique investment solutions to sustain and expand wealth over multiple generations. ShareNett is a distribution partner for ClearList.
The Trellis platform is operationally organized around two services: Investment-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Diligence-as-a-Service (DaaS). These tools were built out of need by the owners of Trellis—some of the largest privately-held wealth management firms and family office networks.
IaaS services are white-labeled to fiduciaries to enable a single sign-on solution for the diligence, investment, and management of private securities. Central to those services is an ongoing KYC and suitability service managed in a secure and fully transparent service on behalf of the fiduciary.
DaaS services are designed to standardize and institutionalize the presentation of private opportunities. For that effort, Trellis has partnered with CrowdSmart, a pioneer in the application of prediction science to investment analysis. CrowdSmart’s platform turns the qualitative assessments shared by a collective of experienced investors, domain experts, and market influencers into predictive quantitative data that feeds an ever-improving AI scoring engine, resulting in a prediction of an issuer’s likelihood to receive significant market interest in a potential securities offering.
“Trellis Software couldn’t be more excited about our partnership with ClearList,” said Tim Krochuk. “Together we will create a world class platform of services targeted at the automation and centralization of issuance and investment in private markets.”
