Officials in Curacao, a Caribbean island off the coast of Venezuela, are hoping Latin American entrepreneurs and investors will have confidence in its relatively new stock exchange intended to make initial public offerings affordable to startups.
“We want to create an exchange that is not only for the business community in Curacao but also for basically the rest of the world,” said Rene Romer, managing director of the Dutch Caribbean Securities Exchange. “That sounds a little grand maybe in the beginning, but our first focus internationally is Latin America. We want Latin American-based entrepreneurs, startups, [family businesses] that want to expand … to be able to raise capital and do that on an exchange that functions in a legal system that is very safe, the Dutch system that we have, and we want to make sure that they can do that at a very affordable price.”
