Financial technology startup Micro Connect has unveiled Micro Connect New Markets (NUMA) -- a new financing paradigm based on contract-based financing that goes beyond stock and bond markets for connecting global professional investors.

Under the NUMA framework, continuous cashflows generated from genuine commercial contracts will be channelled to become an investable asset to satisfy the asset diversification needs of offshore institutions and global professional investors. NUMA is a connection layer that organizes assets through contract law and connects capital through securities law.

It is not intended to replace equity market financing based on ownership or bond market financing based on credit, but rather to complement them with a new financing channel based on the entitlement to contract cashflows which can be more systemically discovered, understood and allocated. Hence, NUMA does not constitute a lending relationship, an equity investment, a trust relationship, or a public offering of securities.

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“We are trying to solve an issue that the global economy has become so large and diversified and so much represented by major companies and financial institutions,” said Charles Li Xiaojia, founder and chairman of Micro Connect, who is also former CEO of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing — the operator of the city’s bourse.

“A huge part of the economy now really distributes small contract-based activities, but Wall Street has never been able to cover them because there is no effective way of finding them, understanding them, appreciating them, and evaluating them,” Li said at a press conference on Monday.

Digitalization and the application of artificial intelligence in the global economy have made data available and transparency demonstrable that are essential for constructing the financial market infrastructure of NUMA, Li added.

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“The AI revolution allows massive numbers of highly frequent dumb calculations that we will never be able to do with humans. We are doing a daily report — we are looking at the big company level and granularly at every single contract every single day,” Li said.

NUMA has three layers: the real-world contract, the protocol contract, and the transaction contact. The investment mechanism moves from the underlying real-world contract to the protocol-layer arrangement, and then to the minimum unit held by investors.

NUMA is not a traditional exchange where trade execution is undertaken by licensed intermediaries and fund custody by licensed custodian banks.

The proposed asset class is only available to professional investors that meet the requirements of applicable jurisdictions, participating through licensed intermediaries.  

Under NUMA, AI plays the role of making commercial contracts readable, comparable and searchable, while people still play a part in legal judgement, suitability review and investment decisions.