Fintech businesses flock to the Rock

A global leader in the Fintech sector is in advanced talks to establish a presence in Gibraltar on the back of the new regulatory framework for distributed ledger technology.

The management of eToro, the world’s largest social trading platform with over 10m registered users and 500 employees worldwide, were in Gibraltar recently to meet Chief Minister Fabian Picardo and Albert Isola, the Minister for Commerce.

That was followed up last week by a meeting in New York between Mr Isola and Yoni Assia, the company’s founder and chief executive, both of whom were attending the NY Consensus event.

Also present at the meeting were Iqbal Gandham, MD for eToro UK office, Anthony Provasoli and Vikram Nagrani of Hassans and Paul Astengo, Co-Chair of the DLT Working Group who leads on technology initiatives for Gibraltar Finance.

“eToro shared their exciting plans, which are at an advanced stage, to expand their business into Gibraltar, a decision taken as a result of the DLT Regulatory Framework that came into force in January 2018,” the government said.

eToro is being advised by Hassans and is one of a number of international companies looking at Gibraltar as a base for Fintech business.

Another company, ProximaX, also announce last week that it had chosen to incorporate its company in Gibraltar because of the new distributed ledger technology regulatory framework that commenced in January 2018 and which provides a conducive environment for DLT businesses.

Lon Wong, who spearheads ProximaX, was the former president and founding member of the billion dollar NEM.io Foundation, an international organisation that oversees the promotion and development of the highly ranked NEM blockchain technology project.

ProximaX is an advanced extension of the NEM Blockchain with utility rich services and protocols.

“The ProximaX solution allows businesses and innovators to avoid costly and failure-prone centralized architecture by utilising an all-in-one decentralized sustainable platform to manage immutable and irreversible, timestamped content delivery, data storage, and media streaming solutions,” the government said.

Advising ProximaX are the Gibraltar law firm, Ellul & Co.