LightPoint Completes Series A Financing Round With Investments From Citco And Ares Management

Citco's Head of Fund Services, Jay Peller and Ares' Chief Executive Officer and President, Michael Arougheti, join as board members

NEW YORK, Sept. 26, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- LightPoint Financial Technology ("LightPoint"), a trading, risk and analytics technology provider, today announced the completion of a Series A investment round. The Citco Group of Companies, a leader of alternative asset services with over $1 trillion assets under administration, and Ares Management L.P. (NYSE: ARES), a global alternative asset manager with over $121 billion in assets under management, led the round, substantially growing LightPoint's total funding. TAP Advisors, LLC advised LightPoint on the transaction and will take a Board Observer seat.

The Series A financing builds on an exceptional year for LightPoint, which since its inception in 2017, has rolled out its fully integrated investment-grade platform developed using proprietary modules – The LightPoint Platform – which is seeing a rapidly growing roster of clients.

Michael Arougheti, Chief Executive Officer and President of Ares Management, has been appointed as a board member and will be joined by Citco's Head of Fund Services Jay Peller, who will provide strategic consult and insight into future product development to build upon Citco's domain knowledge of fund servicing and alternative investment operations. These board member additions add to an already unique management team that sees a powerful partnership between both veteran Wall Street fund managers and seasoned technology business professionals. This partnership allows for a holistic view of the product space and ensures that the technology is solving the right problems and use-cases in an efficient and timely manner.

"We are delighted to have Citco and Ares as strategic investors, and we believe their support reflects the significant value that our technology provides for our clients. Managers are increasingly realizing the rising costs and diminishing returns of in-house platforms," said Patrick Hughes, CEO of LightPoint. "Our technology solutions are built with one thing in mind—supporting managers and their alpha-generating activities."

The LightPoint Platform provides a fully integrated, scalable cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution designed by front-end users for front-end users and built by engineers to scale. Its cloud-agnostic structure supports entire workflows, including portfolio management, trade execution, settlement, compliance, reconciliation, finance, risk, administration and client reporting.  Users have a unique capability of analyzing their collective data to meet the technological challenges of increased regulatory, compliance and investor demands, while staying protected by state-of-art cybersecurity architecture. The LightPoint platform additionally provides a bi-directional API that allows platform integration with custom and third-party software.  

"We have innovated a new business architecture that sees our comprehensive and highly-configurable trading and risk workflow sit on top of an extensible bi-temporal cross-asset book-of-record (BOR) core. This provides managers with a one-stop solution for accessing their data and running analyses," Brant Arseneau, President of LightPoint, explained.  

"With our deep experience, global footprint, and wide range of business relationships, Citco has a unique perspective on our industry's needs. We are happy to extend support to LightPoint and very much look forward to a continued relationship of growth," commented Jay Peller.

"LightPoint provides a great solution to tackle some of our industry's most pressing concerns, and we continue to support the platform's significant growth potential," stated Michael Arougheti.  "We believe LightPoint's enhanced flexibility and comprehensive front-to-back technologies meaningfully enhance asset managers' ability to expand their scalability and efficiency."

LightPoint will continue to innovate its platform's capabilities, constantly improving its modules and expanding into new offerings while applying new proven technologies. Currently, LightPoint aims to leverage its distributed-ledger-technology (DLT) capabilities and transform the core book-of-records into a shared ledger which would be distributed to a trading community. The use of a shared ledger will eliminate many laborious processes and costs, thereby reducing operating risks and costs for their clients and the entire trading community.

About LightPoint Financial Technology
LightPoint is a Fintech company that provides solutions that futureproof institutional clients' data against regulatory requirements, and constructs a data fabric that enables expedient pricing and risk calculations through a cloud-based, SaaS LightPoint Platform. The platform gives managers instant access to institutional quality, cross-asset, end-to-end platform that offers unprecedented functionality and value.

About Citco Group of Companies 
The Citco Group of Companies is a worldwide network of independent financial service companies serving the world's elite hedge funds, private equity and real estate firms, institutional banks, Global 1000 companies and high net worth individuals. Citco companies service these sectors in their respective geographic areas by offering hedge fund administration, custody and fund trading, financial products and corporate governance services solutions. Citco has offices in over 40 countries with more than 6,000 staff.

About Ares Management, L.P.
Ares Management, L.P. is a publicly traded, leading global alternative asset manager with approximately $121.4 billion of assets under management as of June 30, 2018 and 18 offices in the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia. Since its inception in 1997, Ares has adhered to a disciplined investment philosophy that focuses on delivering strong risk-adjusted investment returns throughout market cycles. Ares believes each of its three distinct but complementary investment groups in Credit, Private Equity and Real Estate is a market leader based on assets under management and investment performance. Ares was built upon the fundamental principle that each group benefits from being part of the greater whole. For more information, visit www.aresmgmt.com.

About TAP Advisors, LLC.
TAP Advisors LLC., is a boutique investment bank focused on mergers and acquisitions, and private capital raise activities. The global firm is headquartered in New York City, with subsidiary offices in London and Stockholm.

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SOURCE LightPoint Financial Technology