Micro Connect will, for now, prioritise institutions as potential investors before broadening its reach to include individual investors in the next few years, a company representative has told Macau News Agency.
The Micro Connect (Macao) Financial Assets Exchange, or the MCEX in short, is a new marketplace founded by Hong Kong’s former stock market chief executive, Charles Li, to raise global capital for small businesses in China with a daily revenue sharing mechanism running on the so-called daily revenue contract, or daily revenue obligation.
The company is now tapping into the reins given to Macau by the central government to cultivate a new financial ecosystem – different from those of neighbouring Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Shanghai.
Earlier this month, Micro Connect unveiled another major component of its workings, the MCEX Market Accepted Protocol, a set of rules that govern the flow and storage of key static information about investment contracts.
However, the marketplace is currently open to institutional investors only, such as dealers, lenders, researchers, and brokers, said Leighton Mok, vice president of the MCEX.
“We only allow institutions because that’s the target audience we have first spoken to and received lots of feedback from,” said the company representative at the FMCC Breakfast Talk Rendez-Vous organised by the France Macau Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday.
“But that does not mean there is no opportunity for future individual investors. Through what avenue, this is their discretion.”
According to him, Micro Connect may consider expanding access to the asset market further to small players in years to come.
“We don’t want to opine or encourage based on any bias or create a sort of impact on their decision making, but individual investors have full liberty moving forward in the future to go through what avenue they want to invest in this ecosystem,” he added.
Mok said in an update that as many as 12,300 shops across 33 provinces and 270 cities had so far received funding via the marketplace, or about 690 franchises.
An additional 3,200 are now in the pipeline.
