Uptevia was created on 1st January 2023 in response to the shared desire of CACEIS and BNP Paribas to offer a specialised, enhanced and scalable range of services, as well as cutting-edge technological solutions, for corporate clients in France.
After having received the necessary authorisations from the relevant regulatory and competition authorities at the end of December, the two banks have announced the completion of their proposed agreement, which was made public on 18th March 2022.
The new structure, named ‘Uptevia’, is owned in equal shares by the two banks, and illustrates their common ambition: to create a leader in corporate trust activities in France, and eventually at a European level. Uptevia is indeed a newly coined brand name which evokes the ideas of ascending (UP), and moving (VIA).
"We are delighted that we have received the necessary regulatory and competition approvals to realise this ambitious project. The creation of Uptevia is a success for both our banking groups. Our clients will be able to benefit from all the advantages of working with a powerful player to face the challenges of this rapidly evolving business", said Lionel Barthélémy, who was appointed CEO of Uptevia on 1st January.
Uptevia offers issuers a wide range of services including shareholder recordkeeping (shares, bonds, warrants, etc.), organising and centralising general meetings, setting up and centralising financial operations, and managing employee shareholding plans. It also provides equivalent services for fixed income products such as bonds and negotiable debt securities.
By extension, the services offered by Uptevia also include services to investors - shareholders, bondholders, employees - such as investor relations management (web/email and call-center services), stock market order receipt-transmission, centralisation of subscriptions, votes, responses to securities transactions, and related reporting, particularly for tax purposes.
Both banking partners have solid, common and highly complementary expertise and share a similar vision for the business. With the creation of Uptevia, they reaffirm their long-held commitment to corporate services.
The issuer services business requires constant and significant investment. It sits on the borders of corporate and investment banking, asset management, retail banking (with large volumes to be processed) and digital solutions provision (time-to-market and support for multiple languages, with strong security constraints).
"The time was right to take advantage of synergies and economies of scale, pool expertise and share investments in order to offer our clients a complete range of services at the highest level of market standards, both in terms of security and quality," added Lionel Barthélémy.
Uptevia has the necessary resources to operate independently on the market by pooling sales and relationship management, operational, IT and legal teams, including IT platforms specific to its activities, and more generally, all resources and expertise necessary to conducting business.
The new company will offer issuers an open-architecture model, so that it can be more easily integrated into the various IT systems of issuing companies.
Furthermore, the increased scale enables the company to play the role of "opinion leader" in the market, serving the interests of issuer clients, particularly with regard to consultation on regulatory issues such as SRD II, or on those already implemented such as adjustment of the Record Date for voting rights, or on the legal changes needed in France to move towards the full digitisation of convocation notices and remote voting at general meetings.
Initially, only the name of the entity and the contact email addresses will change for CACEIS and BNP Paribas clients and their investors. Services will continue to be provided under the same conditions by CACEIS and by BNP Paribas, using their existing IT systems. "The priority is to ensure the continuity of our quality of service, relying on our teams, our experts and the robustness of our existing IT platforms. From this solid base, we will progressively enrich our product offering to provide our issuer clients and their investors with innovative, high- quality services. We have set ourselves a two-year target to consolidate all services under a single IT environment that meets our high standards in terms of security and technological advancement," added Lionel Barthélémy.
The respective teams, although integrated into Uptevia's corporate framework since 1st January, will be grouped together in automn 2023 in a shared office located in the ‘La Défense’ district near Paris.
To find out more about Uptevia, visit: www.uptevia.com
