There's a new kid in town and his name is SPAC. Everywhere you go in the financial world, you hear about some kind of SPAC deal taking place. A SPAC, or Special Purpose Acquisition Corporation, is a new way of taking a company public without going through a lot of pre-listing due diligence. The idea is that you create a SPAC, which is just an empty shell whose sole purpose is to buy real companies later on, and get it listed on the stock exchange of choice. Since it is an empty suit that has no non-monetary assets or business to slow things down via rigorous scrutiny, it is easier to get a listing.

What Is A SPAC

Afterwards, the SPAC is used to "buy" an existing company that wants to go public but doesn't want to expose itself to a lot of SEC scrutiny or time-consuming delays. The two companies can also "merge". In either event, the façade of the SPAC is wound down and the new venture changes its ticker symbol to that of the targeted acquisition in a process known as a reverse merger.

Apex Clearing Reverse Merger

Case in point is the recent announcement regarding the SPAC Northern Star Investment Corporation II Apex Clearing reverse merger. The newly-merged entity will be listed as APX on the New York Stock Exchange and will bid adieu to the corporate profile of the technically senior partner in the transaction.

What this reverse merger will do is provide Apex with the public recognition that it has already earned among dedicated professionals through its quiet back office viability in the financial community. Apex has provided the lifting power for many innovative financial companies and revolutionary new techniques that have greatly broadened the ability of ordinary people to participate in the great stock market boom of the past several years.

Robinhood and Apex

Until it opened up its own platform, the now-well-known firm Robinhood used Apex as the clearinghouse for all of its financial transactions. Apex was a pioneer in both fractional share and crypto trading. A lot of entities are powered by Apex in one way or another. Firmly profitable and now about to become widely available to the general public, the brain trust behind Apex has set the company up for a regular moonshot.

When American companies decide to go public, they have to go through an Initial Public Offering (or IPO). This is a lengthy and expensive process that takes months, perhaps longer than a year. Audits, investigations, legal fees and many other factors play into an IPO and not everyone is willing to undergo this. That’s when reverse mergers come into play: A reverse merger is a process where a private company acquires a publicly-traded company to bypass issuing an IPO and becoming a public company faster. There are a lot of companies that have used this method, both successful and not.

NYSE

The most well-known case of a reverse merger happened on December 6, 2015. The New York Stock Exchange (or NYSE), a business with over 200 years’ worth of history, decided to merge with Archipelago Holdings, an electronic trading company. The sole objective of this merger was for the NYSE to become a public traded company. Four months later, on March 2016, NYSE became the NYSE group and Archipelago Exchange turned into its subsidiary under the name NYSE Arca.

This reverse merger proved so successful than less than a year later the NYSE group completed another merger, this time with Euronext. The result was NYSE Euronext, a transatlantic stock exchange, the first of its kind.

There are three key ways for companies to go public, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. The first is to use an investment bank and Initial Public Offering (IPO). The second option is to use a lawyer and auditor to file paperwork reporting as a public company, and the third, and arguably the most advantageous, is to initiate a reverse merger.

What is a Reverse Merger?
Reverse mergers are mergers acquired by a private company in order to make themselves public. While the initial process of becoming a public company is complicated, long-winded and expensive, using a reverse merger is an easy way for a private company to convert to public and get listed on the exchange.
Reverse mergers have becoming a very respected way for businesses to restructure. While lawsuits are fairly common, reverse mergers have a number of advantages, and help private companies become listed as public without the issues that stem from listing a company via an IPO.