Earthport flies after heavyweight FX appointment and broker tip

Earthport shares were one of the top risers in London on Wednesday, helped by the strengthening of its forex team with a heavyweight appointment and some encouraging words from a broker.

The AIM-listed payments network provider, which enables financial institutions, money transfer organisations and digital merchants to more easily and cheaply send cross-border payments, appointed former ex-Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan F brokerage head Peter Klein as its new global head of FX, effective immediately.

"A strong FX product offering complementing our core payments and compliance capability is key to fulfilling this mission: we plan to expand the functionality and treasury sophistication within the Earthport product suite," said Earthport's European head, Daniel Marovitz.

"Peter will lead the execution of a powerful integrated strategy to support our global payment network.”

Earlier, Jamie Constable, equity sales partner at broker N+1Singer noted that Earthport's share price had recently fallen back from its high reached in September of 46p to 27p at the latest close but suggested buying on the back of the company's placement in a hot area of the payments space.

"There has been a lot of "noise" in the global payments sector around for example block chain and its potential application," he said.

"It is important to note that if distributed ledger technologies are adopted by the banking community then Earthport already has significant experience in the area via its partnership with Ripple and could be perfectly positioned to be the hub in the middle. In the meantime they are engaged with a wide number of organisations both corporate and institutional around their solutions."

While cautioning investors that this was a long-term play, he suggested the fall back in the shares provided a "great opportunity" to build a holding.

Earthport's 22% rise on the day to 33.75p suggested some others agreed.