Wadworth & Co, the Devizes-based brewer and pub operator founded in 1875, has been admitted to trading on Asset Match Private Market, the FCA-approved PISCES venue. The inaugural auction for Wadworth’s A Ordinary Shares opened on 4 August 2026, with the Designated Auction Period running from 11 August until 30 September 2026.
Wadworth is the first company to list on the Asset Match PISCES venue, marking a small but notable proof-of-concept moment for the regime’s rollout.
Wadworth has traded its A Ordinary Shares through quarterly auctions on the standard Asset Match platform since February 2023, with more than 300,000 shares changing hands over that period. The move to the PISCES venue widens the eligible investor pool beyond the previous restricted market, supported by independent research from Hardman & Co that will remain accessible throughout the auction window.
Ben Weaver, business development director at Asset Match, said the auction “represents the first opportunity for a broader pool of eligible investors to acquire shares in Wadworth, supported by independent research that will provide additional transparency and valuable insight into the business and its long-term prospects.”
Simon Townsend, chairman of Wadworth, framed the move as consistent with the company’s long-standing independence: the firm has operated as a family business since its founding and takes what he described as a long-term approach to growth for the benefit of customers, employees and shareholders.
What PISCES means in practice
PISCES, the Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System, is the FCA’s sandbox framework for secondary trading in private company shares. It allows eligible investors to trade in otherwise illiquid equity during defined auction windows, with a disclosed order book and a non-discretionary algorithm setting a single clearing price. Asset Match received authorisation as a PISCES operator under the framework, which received Royal Assent in the Finance Act 2025 and moved into live operation in 2026.
The regime is designed to address a long-recognised gap in UK capital markets: the absence of a regulated, transparent secondary market between the fully private and fully public states. For companies like Wadworth, which has no current intention of seeking a public listing, PISCES offers a structured route to shareholder liquidity and price discovery without the disclosure burden of an AIM or main-market flotation.
Market context and competitive landscape
Asset Match is one of a small number of platforms positioning itself within the PISCES framework. The UK private-markets secondary segment has historically been fragmented, with share transfers in private companies largely conducted bilaterally and at infrequent intervals. The FCA’s sandbox approach is an attempt to formalise that activity and improve transparency for both companies and investors.
Wadworth’s inclusion is significant precisely because of its ordinariness as a subject: it is not a high-growth technology business seeking pre-IPO liquidity, but a capital-intensive, asset-rich hospitality operator with a tangible estate of more than 140 pubs. If the PISCES model works for businesses of this type, it broadens the potential addressable market for platforms like Asset Match considerably beyond the venture-backed company constituency that dominates most private-market liquidity discussions.
The 30 September clearing date will be a useful early data point for the venue, with the volume of matched orders and the resulting clearing price providing the first public signal of investor appetite at the PISCES level rather than the previous restricted market.
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