NLG.L Regulatory News (NLG)

26 February 2014

Arria NLG plc

 ("Arria", the "Company" or the "Group")

Appointment of Senior Vice President, Business Development

Arria NLG plc (AIM: NLG), a leader in the development and deployment of Natural Language Generation ("NLG") technologies, announces the appointment of Christopher Messina as Senior Vice President, Business Development.

Mr. Messina has strong, international experience in capital markets, private equity and financial technology. He comes to Arria after being CEO and Co-Founder of RPA Capital, LLC, a New York- and Bermuda-based alternative asset management firm focused on private credit and physical commodity trading.

He was formerly Managing Partner of Mannahatta Partners, LLC, a New York-based specialist financial services advisory firm focused on investment product structuring, exchange-traded and OTC derivatives markets and private equity transactions, where he advised multiple global exchanges, private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds. Prior to Mannahatta Partners, Mr. Messina was the Chief Operating Officer for the Global Futures business at ICAP plc. 

He has worked with Goldman Sachs in New York and Goldman Sachs JBWere in Australia in operational risk, proprietary investments and quantitative research. While at Goldman Sachs in 1999, he was part of the team that created BrokerTec Global, the fully-electronic, fixed income inter-dealer broker that was acquired by ICAP in 2003. 

He has an AB in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, where he was a National Merit Scholar, and an MBA in Finance from the Australian Graduate School of Management.

He has worked in the USA, Africa, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East. A contributing author to Shari'ah Compliant Private Equity: A Primer for the Executive (Euromoney Books, 2010), he has lectured on derivatives and Shar'iah finance at law schools and conferences globally. Mr. Messina is a member of Business Executives for National Security and the New York Coal Trade Association.

He will be based in Arria's New York office, with a global focus on business development, initially in the institutional capital and derivatives markets, corporate risk management and commodity infrastructure and logistics.

Stuart Rogers, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Arria NLG plc, commented:

 "Bringing someone of Christopher's experience to Arria adds clear further strength to our business development capabilities. His career has seen him work across the globe with its diverse cultures, and apply his considerable knowledge to a long line of success stories, including some of the world's preeminent financial institutions. With his extensive background, Christopher understands the mission critical requirements for financial exchanges and trading systems and will be a great benefit to our appreciation and knowledge, as we look to move further into this sizeable market. He is a strong addition to our team."

Christopher Messina commented:

"Over a 20 year career in investment banking, derivatives structuring and alternative asset management, I have seen a great deal of what works and what does not when it comes to the application of leading-edge technology to real-world business processes. I have rarely come across a technology that has such potential to transform the way we turn an ever-increasing sea of data into actionable information at lightning speed. I am delighted to be working with Arria NLG to develop applications for the NLG Engine across industries, ranging from the fundamental institutions of the global capital markets to enterprise risk management - in short, anywhere that Big Data runs up against human analytical bandwidth constraints. In ten years' time, one will be hard-pressed to find a large, complex company that has not embraced Natural Language Generation in its core processes."

Contacts:

Background

ARRIA NLG plc

Arria is a UK headquartered software development business. Its core product, the Arria NLG Engine, originated from research at the University of Aberdeen, a leading institution in the field of Natural Language Generation. Arria's target is to be the global leader in the development and deployment of mission critical, core industrial, enterprise level NLG software technologies.

Its technology is already deployed in a mission critical environment, monitoring large-scale industrial machinery located on oil and gas production platforms in deepwater Gulf of Mexico for a major global oil and gas company. It is also in use at the UK Met Office.