Houlihan Lokey Advises Celoxica

Houlihan Lokey is pleased to announce that Celoxica, a specialist provider of ultra-low-latency execution infrastructure for listed equities, futures, fixed income, and options, has been acquired by smartTrade Technologies SAS (smartTrade), a global leader in multi-asset electronic trading and payments solutions.

Celoxica delivers ultra-low-latency trading services through software- and hardware-accelerated engineering across more than 80 venues worldwide. Its fully managed service is trusted by Tier 1 prime brokers, systematic quantitative funds, and algorithmic trading desks. The acquisition complements smartTrade’s existing ultra-low-latency solutions and services, extending the Group’s coverage from OTC to listed markets and from orchestration and pricing to execution infrastructure.

smartTrade provides AI-driven, multi-asset trading and payments technology to financial institutions. Headquartered in France, smartTrade serves more than 250 clients from 12 offices worldwide, covering FX, precious metals, money markets, fixed income, digital assets, and derivatives via secure SaaS.

smartTrade and Celoxica lead at complementary layers of the front-office stack. smartTrade leads in workflow orchestration, pricing, and distribution across Trading (LiquidityFX), FX Derivatives (kACE), and Payments (Commercial Banking and Payments). Celoxica leads at the risk and execution infrastructure layer, where its feed handlers, market access gateways, and order execution engines deliver deterministic, microsecond-to-nanosecond execution with in-line pre-trade risk. Together, the Group covers more of the trading stack than either company could alone.

The transaction also extends the Group’s reach into new client segments across the sellside and buyside, and into additional asset classes. It opens Celoxica’s technology to smartTrade’s more than 250 clients worldwide, supported by offices, sales, support, and engineering teams across EMEA, the Americas, and APAC.

The acquisition builds on smartTrade’s previous successful acquisitions, each of which has developed and expanded the Group’s ecosystem of products. Jean-Marc Bouhelier, General Manager of Celoxica, continues to lead the business and joins the smartTrade Executive Committee. Celoxica’s client relationships, contracts, support, and day-to-day service remain unchanged.

The result is an ecosystem of interconnected solutions and services for financial institutions seeking to monetise their flows, reduce risk, and grow market share—now spanning both OTC and listed markets. Celoxica clients will have the opportunity to benefit from smartTrade’s multi-asset trading and payments solutions, including connectivity, aggregation, distribution, OMS, and analytics, together with the Group’s significant AI capabilities. smartTrade clients will have access to Celoxica’s listed-markets connectivity, deep ultra-low-latency capabilities, and pre-trade risk technology, complementing smartTrade’s existing solutions.

Houlihan Lokey served as the exclusive financial advisor to Celoxica. This transaction further strengthens Houlihan Lokey’s proven track record and expertise in the capital markets technology sector.

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