Ablrate to close secondary market ahead of ASMX launch

Ablrate will close its secondary market tomorrow evening in preparation for launching and integrating ASMX into the platform by next Wednesday (14 October).

David Bradley-Ward (pictured), chief executive of the platform, said that he is closing Ablrate’s platform on Thursday and reopening it in the evening without a secondary market.

He said this is to will allow his team to work on uploading new code ahead of the ASMX launch and integration with Ablrate next week.

Bradley-Ward said that ASMX, which aims to boost liquidity for investors, will be used for Ablrate’s new secondary market, which he has rebranded as the loan exchange, before potentially opening the blockchain-based technology up for use by other peer-to-peer lending platforms.

He said that he is confident that ASMX will not encounter problems when it launches after months of testing it.

“We’re going to be finally launching ASMX which is the goal we have all been working towards,” Bradley-Ward said.

“We’ve tested it a lot and don’t anticipate any issues.

“All sorts of challenges have arisen, it’s just refining things to ensure it will update the platform in a timely fashion. For example, it was slow updating financial statements so we had to speed that up.”

ASMX was originally set to launch in mid-March, but this was delayed with the platform undergoing testing and considering adopting a black box model in June.

In July, Bradley-Ward said the launch was delayed after his team encountered a technological issue that they were fixing.

A month later he eyed a September launch and revealed that ASMX is aiming for standardisation across P2P lending platforms to benefit investors.

At the time he said that the platform was seeking institutional investment to create professional liquidity and that the marketplace – which will be available on both desktop and mobiles – will only charge a 0.25 per cent fee once the benefits start to come to fruition.