Raphael John-Lall

CEO of the T&T Stock Ex­change Wayne Iton says the Ini­tial Pub­lic Of­fer­ing (IPO) of shares in First Cit­i­zen Bank (FCB) will be a sound in­vest­ment."From the Stock Ex­change per­spec­tive it is some­thing we are look­ing for­ward to. It is a qual­i­ty list­ing. From all in­di­ca­tions it is go­ing to be well ac­cept­ed by the in­vest­ing pub­lic."Then we look for­ward to af­ter it is list­ed and trad­ed in the sec­ondary mar­ket. It is the kind of list­ing any mar­ket would wel­come.

"Good fun­da­men­tals, good man­age­ment," Iton said when he spoke at a Cli­co In­vest­ment Fund IPO Stake­hold­er Recog­ni­tion Cer­e­mo­ny at the Trinidad Union Club in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day.Com­ment­ing on FCB's IPO which is set for a June launch, Iton said it will add to the over­all in­vest­ment di­ver­si­ty of the lo­cal cap­i­tal mar­ket."So there are many in­vest­ment op­tions that T&T would have," he said.

Iton said the Cli­co In­vest­ment Fund (CIF) IPO has done well over the last few months."Hav­ing list­ed the CIF it has proven to be a valu­able ad­di­tion to our list­ing in terms of liq­uid­i­ty."We have had in ex­cess of 1,100 trades in the four or five months and has done 12.6 bil­lion units and it is a val­ue of about TT $275 mil­lion. That is a sig­nif­i­cant ad­di­tion to the cap­i­tal mar­kets," he said.Iton said tech­nol­o­gy has helped changed the way trad­ing is done.

"We processed about 6,000 pol­i­cy­hold­ers and we have not had a lot of IPOs in this mar­ket for a long time and we are very pleased to have it."But it al­so gave us the op­por­tu­ni­ty to show­case our new tech­nol­o­gy. If this were done ten years ago it would have had to be 6,000 share cer­tifi­cates gen­er­at­ed. Now with the new tech­nol­o­gy, pub­lic of­fers are han­dled by a file up­load.

"So you process 6,000 ap­pli­ca­tions and at the end of the day we get an elec­tron­ic pass that al­lo­cates the shares of the units of the 6,000 share­hold­ers," he said.He said so far it has been a good year for the stock ex­change."It has been very en­cour­ag­ing and we an­tic­i­pate the rest of the year to be like­wise. In terms of vol­ume and val­ue we are well ahead of bud­get and we an­tic­i­pate it is go­ing to con­tin­ue like that. We are ex­cit­ed about ad­di­tion­al list­ings down the road.

"So in ad­di­tion to First Cit­i­zens Group com­ing aboard, we ex­pect an­oth­er two or three new of­fer­ings in the mar­ket fur­ther on," he said.