Built to Launch.

A new international financial centre had the ambition, the regulation and the mandate. What it did not yet have was the post-trade infrastructure to make a market real.

There was no incumbent depository to extend and no legacy to migrate. That is freeing and unforgiving in equal measure. Everything had to be built, and it had to be trustworthy from the first day of trading, because a depository that participants cannot rely on is not a depository at all.

The timeline was measured in months. The expectation was a system that regulators, custodians and brokers would all stake their operations on.

We deployed AvenirCSD as the depository for the new centre. Rather than write a new system, we configured a proven one: account structures, settlement models and the corporate-actions calendar were set up to match the market that was being created.

Connectivity came through FIX and documented APIs for the trading venue and participant systems, with SWIFT messaging for the wider settlement chain. Because the platform is modular, the market could go live with the capabilities it needed first, and add the rest on a clear roadmap.

Going live in three months only counts if what goes live is sound.

The pace came from configuration over construction, and from a delivery team that had built depositories before and knew which decisions mattered early. Testing ran in parallel with setup, not after it, so the market entered production on a system that had already been exercised against real scenarios.

We went live in months, not years, without asking the market to accept a thinner system in return.

Launch was the start of the relationship, not the end of the engagement. As the market grew, new asset classes and corporate-action types were added through configuration, and the same team that delivered the platform stayed close to operate and extend it.

Because the people who built the system remained reachable, questions were answered by the people who knew the answer, not routed through a queue.

A new financial centre opened with a depository that worked from day one, and has kept working since.

Participants settle, hold and service securities on infrastructure that has grown to more than a million and a half accounts, on a platform delivered in a fraction of the time a build of this kind usually takes.

A market does not have to choose between fast and sound. With the right platform and the right team, it can have both.