CoinShares, the largest digital asset investment firm in Europe, has acquired an additional 20.8 per cent stake in Swiss-based Flowbank. The additional stake comes on the back of a 9.02 per cent stake purchased in October, 2021. With today’s disclosure, CoinShares now has an overall holding of 29.3 percent in FlowBank and voting rights equivalent to 32.06 per cent.
The stake purchase in FlowBank comes after approval from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority and the transaction is valued at CHF 24.74M (approximately €24.15M). The transaction makes the digital asset investment firm a joint controlling stakeholder alongside FlowBank CEO Charles Henri Sabet. According to Crunchbase, FlowBank has raised a total of $11.85M since its founding in 2020.
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A larger crypto-asset play
CoinShares manages financial and crypto-based exchange-traded products on bourses across Europe. The mission of the company is to enable access to digital assets “through unparalleled financial service technology”. With Europe making major strides on regulation of digital assets and creating a marketplace for trading such assets, CoinShares is looking at a bigger play for crypto and other digital assets.
It envisions being a leader in decentralised finance (DeFi), web3, and other blockchain-based integrated technologies becoming part of the financial ecosystem. With its increased stake in FlowBank, the company is looking to reach a broader investor market seeking exposure to digital and crypto-based asset classes.
Europe is emerging as a new hub for digital assets and Switzerland has the highest adoption rate in the continent. In 2018, the Swiss Economy Minister went as far as to announce that the country should become “the crypto nation”. While Europe is probably a few years away from launching a digital euro, the idea of digital assets is not foreign in Europe.
In Switzerland, FlowBank acts as a multi-asset trading platform offering a range of online banking and investment services to brokers and corporate clients. As part of this transaction, FlowBank will use Galata, a proprietary technology platform that acts as a gateway to the digital asset ecosystem.
Built by CoinShares, Galata connects the CeFi platforms to digital asset protocols and markets. By leveraging Galata, FlowBank will be able to offer a variety of digital assets to its clients. The central idea here is to offer clients access to a suite of financial products and crypto ETPs, enabling them to trade digital assets on traditional exchanges such as Euronext, Börse Xetra, and Six Swiss Exchange.
Jean-Marie Mognetti, CEO of CoinShares, says, “After remarkable financial results in 2021, we continue to build an ambitious plan to make CoinShares an essential and leading player in the digital asset space. We are very excited to increase our participation in FlowBank, a key innovative player in Switzerland powered by a unique technology, and allow them to leverage our technology and digital asset expertise. This is aligned with our strategic plan to make CoinShares an integrated digital asset fintech company.”
FlowBank: what you need to know
FlowBank was founded by Charles Henri Sabet in 2020 as an online bank headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. Sabet has extensive experience managing money in foreign exchange and having seen the transformation brought by technology that allowed retail investors to place trades online, Sabet brought the same experience to online foreign exchange.
With FlowBank, Sabet has a simplified vision of connecting people to the global market and has a team of over 100 people. By joining hands with CoinShares, Sabet aims to turn FlowBank into a platform that not only serves investors of today but also investors of tomorrow. Jean-Marie Mognetti, CEO of CoinShares, will join FlowBank’s board of directors and will advise the firm on its crypto strategy.
FlowBank currently offers more than 50,000 financial products including stocks, ETFs, bonds, options, Forex, CFDs, and more. As part of Galata integration, FlowBank’s clients will be able to invest in CoinShares’ crypto on CFDs and gain exposure to digital currencies.
“We are delighted that CoinShares continues to recognise and support FlowBank’s great potential and accomplishments and has decided to increase its stake in our bank. Today, FlowBank’s clients can invest in CoinShares’ crypto on CFDs and gain exposure to digital currencies in this way. This is only the beginning. We look forward to collaborating further with CoinShares in the coming months and taking our product offering to the next level, together,” says Sabet.
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