Innovative digital ecosystem reduces the time and cost of equity issuance document production
London, 7 April, 2020. ScribeStar, a digital ecosystem that improves the efficiency and reduces the cost and time required for document production for capital markets transactions, was used by Travers Smith and Investec to produce the prospectus for Smithson Investment Trust plc’s 2020 to 2021 pre-approved issue of £400m of shares, announced on 1 April, 2020.
Launched by Fundsmith founder Terry Smith, and managed by Simon Barnard and Will Morgan, Smithson became the largest UK-domiciled investment trust when it raised £822.5m in October 2018, vastly exceeding its £250m target. The approval for the new issuance follows Smithson’s robust performance and strong investor interest.
Srinivas Suravarapu, CEO of ScribeStar, said: “Smithson’s focus on delivering ‘superior performance for a reasonable cost’ resonates with our mission of providing a cutting-edge digital platform that improves the efficiency and speed of creating capital markets documents and reduces the cost of production. We are delighted that Travers Smith, one of the leading capital markets law firms in the UK, has been a strategic partner as we have built the business into a digital ecosystem that improves legal and regulatory processes for the entire capital markets issuance process, for funds, IPOs, rights issues, AIM admissions and high yield bonds.”
Aaron Stocks, head of funds at Travers Smith, said: “ScribeStar helped us immensely on the Smithson prospectus and transaction documentation. The ability to link multiple documents within ScribeStar’s ecosystem meant that preparing all of the related documentation became much simpler and quicker and at a lower cost than traditional methods allow. Our funds team is constantly looking at ways to enhance our service to clients and we are very pleased to have been an early adopter of ScribeStar. What virtual datarooms did to enhance the efficiency and reduce the cost of due diligence by removing the need for physical documents, ScribeStar is doing for the capital markets space.”
Srinivas added: “The ScribeStar platform is perfectly set-up for remote working so there was no problem for the Smithson teams in producing the prospectus during this period of managing with Covid-19.”
ScribeStar’s leverage of dynamic data throughout its ecosystem allows far greater use of previous versions of documents, generating increased efficiencies when developing documents for follow on share issues such as rights issues, open offers or placing programmes. This was the case in the Smithson fundraising as the ScribeStar ecosystem could utilize the data, tagging and verification already embedded in the original prospectus. ScribeStar also embeds all ancillary documents such as power of attorneys, legal opinions and comfort letters, allowing changes to flow throughout each document thus saving time in the documentation production process. ScribeStar linked 20 documents in the Smithson transaction.
Contact Simon Barker at sbarker@barkercomms.com
+44 7866 314 331
