Intengo Market looks to revolutionise Africa’s corporate debt market
Intengo Market, a digital corporate credit marketplace that was previously incubated by Rand Merchant Bank (RMB), is looking to revolutionise the way corporate debt instruments are issued and traded in SA and the rest of the continent.
The digital credit platform, which was only launched in October 2021, has been moved out of incubation phase under the auspices of RMB, and will now be run as a stand-alone business. Intengo Market also has its own newly appointed CEO in Ian Norden, an actuary by profession who was appointed to head up the platform at the beginning of August.
“We’ve just hit R50bn in bids on the platform and issued about R24bn in debt,” Norden told Business Day in an interview. “That makes us the largest digital platform in this space outside of the exchanges.”
The platform allows corporates to reduce their reliance on bank funding and will allow for secondary trading before year-end, thereby deepening liquidity in an SA corporate credit market that is still dominated by private placements and off-book trades between institutional investors.
However, should Intengo Market take off the way its new CEO envisages, it could also open up the way for a potential rollout of the platform’s services in the rest of Africa, where corporate bond issuance is still largely in its infancy.
Kick-starting a Pan African corporate bond market could also have several downstream positives ranging from deepening funding pools for business expansion while attracting new institutional investors to fixed income returns in a developing corporate credit market frontier.
That could quite easily see Intengo Market attracting offshore institutional investors to Africa’s corporate debt market by providing them with a standardised and trusted process on a tailored digital platform that is supported by a blue-chip banking group. It also provides a transparent legal framework, offering a reassuring degree of legislative familiarity to international institutional investors.
“If things go well in SA we’ll take it into the rest of the continent in time and use it to open up access to new corporate issuance flows,” said Norden. “That’s the dream but it needs to be tested here before we can take it to the rest of the continent or other parts of the world.”
In the meantime, Intengo Market’s more immediate goal is to encourage other SA banks to use the platform by moving assets such as corporate debt, project bonds or infrastructure-related debt facilities off of their balance sheets via the secondary market, which will be launched before end-2022. That would help deleverage their balance sheets, thereby allowing local banks to fund yet more projects, something that will be key to SA’s planned infrastructure investment drive.
“That helps solve one of the problems local banks face when funding these sorts of projects — the slow velocity of their balances sheets. By helping banks speed up their balance sheet velocity they can go on to fund other projects while at the same time the general liquidity in the corporate debt market is also improved.”
