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.