Armenian capital markets have grown considerably over the past few years, providing new financing options for companies and fueling economic growth. We spoke to Mikayel Margaryan, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Management Board at Cube Invest about how his company has positioned itself strongly in this sector and how he sees capital markets developing in the near future.
Interview : Arshak Tovmasyan, Nazareth Seferian Photo : Cube Invest
Mr. Margaryan, tell us more about how Cube Invest was established and where you are today compared to where you started.
— In 2017, Cube Invest was launched as an independent Armenian investment company—there was no other financial institution with which we were affiliated.
We started as a family office, investing our shareholder money with a clear strategy to manage our proprietary portfolio.
For several years, we operated very successfully with this model, but we made a strategic decision in 2022 to transform into a client-facing business. We kept the business line of proprietary portfolio management, and we expect this to remain part of our work in the future.
But we added new offers for institutional clients such as foreign exchange transactions, brokerage and custody services. We became members of the Armenian Stock Exchange and the Central Depository of Armenia, carrying out transactions there. Just last year, we provided four underwriting services for private sector companies issuing bonds in the local market—our work has included both the primary underwriting and activities in the secondary market. We are constantly looking to strengthen our position in the market and develop new services. We are members of the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME) and the Tabadul Hub in the Middle East. We are one of only two investment companies in Armenia that have a rating from the international agency Fitch and we have an ISO 27001 certificate for information security management. We also founded a sister credit organization with the same shareholder structure, which recently received its license from the Central Bank.
You have been recognized as Armenia’s fastest growing brokerage company. What has contributed to that success?
— There are several factors that led to this, starting with the context of the geopolitical events that took place in 2022. There was a lot of capital influx, including human capital, into Armenia. Capital markets in Russia were very well developed compared to Armenia. The Armenian public used to mostly put their savings in deposits back then or hold cash. When a large number of Russians came to Armenia, the demand grew for different investment instruments, which have now also become visible to our local population. Improved financial literacy was another important factor.
The Central Bank is doing a good job in this area by providing the right financial regulations. All this contributed to the fast pace of the capital market development in Armenia, and our decision to switch from our family office model to a client-facing business was very timely in this context. We have mostly institutional clients at the moment, but our local retail customer base is growing very quickly. We expect this segment to form a significantly larger proportion of our customer base soon. Overall, we plan to grow by around 10% this year. At the moment, we are developing our own super application. Personally, I did not originally refer to it this way, but several of our international partners began to call it a “super app” when they learned more about our plans for it. It will include everything that a customer can do through Cube Invest—all of this will now be at their fingertips, including primary options, foreign exchange transactions, trading, and so on.
Let’s talk a little about the bond market in the country. How much appetite do companies now have to raise funds by issuing bonds? Are there still any obstacles impeding the growth of this market?
— As I mentioned earlier, we have underwritten four issuances of corporate bonds since November 2025, with a fifth one ongoing now and a couple more in the pipeline. The Government launched a capital markets development initiative in 2020, which was initially slightly delayed because of COVID and other reasons. In 2025, the Ministry of Economy presented an incentivization program including subsidies for the underwriting fees and other costs that corporates pay to companies like ours when they want to issue bonds. There was also a subsidy for three percentage points, up to a certain ceiling amount, for the interest rate that the corporation pays on the bonds. Very importantly, when an investor gets income from these bonds, it is not taxed, in contrast to the interest from deposits.
This program directed a lot of attention to the issuance of new bonds, simultaneously unlocking new options for funding for Armenian companies while also making them more transparent and encouraging better levels of governance. Importantly, for companies like ours, we bear responsibility to ensure that the companies whose bonds we underwrite are fiscally healthy and with sound governance. As the underwriter, we are putting our reputation on the line, and we should never offer something to the public in which we would not invest our own money. In terms of obstacles, there is perhaps still some lack of understanding and financial literacy, but this has improved tremendously over the last couple of years. Although we see that Armenian companies are quite comfortable with bonds, very few of them go for initial public offerings (IPOs) or list shares in the stock exchange. Perhaps this is a cultural thing, perhaps they don’t want to give up ownership of their company, even partially.
You mentioned that you joined Tabadul, the Abu Dhabi-based securities depository and exchange platform. What does this connection to Gulf capital markets mean for your clients?
— Traditionally, when someone talks about investing in stocks, they think about big names like Google, Apple, Tesla, Microsoft—companies in US markets. Everyone knows the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ and are happy to be listed there. But there are some very good companies in the Gulf region. Tabadul gives our clients the opportunity to consider some alternatives to the US stock market. The second thing is that it also allows access from Gulf countries to Armenia. A brokerage company in Abu Dhabi can join Tabadul and then have access to the Armenian Stock Exchange.
We know that there is now a growing demand towards Armenian government bonds denominated in Armenian Drams. Around 4-5 years ago, we had only around 100 million USD of investment in these bonds, but that number has now grown six times. Just this February, together with AMX and a couple of other companies, we visited the Abu Dhabi Stock Exchange with some high-level officials and presented the opportunities in Armenia that could be attractive to their investors.
If you have to identify the single largest structural barrier to the development of capital markets in Armenia, what would it be?
— I would say financial literacy is still an issue, if we compare ourselves to other countries. In the United States, for example, a high school graduate already understands what it means to invest and this comes naturally as an option for managing their finances. And I am not just saying this as the representative of an investment company. If you have a population that considers it natural to invest, this can be a powerful driver for economic growth.
To be fair, I should say that a lot of work is being done to improve our levels of financial literacy, but there is still more to do.
What is your vision for capital markets in Armenia five years from now or further in the future?
— There is every sign that it will develop, I am optimistic. We have some geopolitical tension around us—the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the conflict in the Middle East. Everything is unfolding quite quickly and unexpectedly. We need to understand that
we are living in a world with a much higher degree of uncertainty than before. I still believe that Armenia is in a good position for sustained development in the coming years.
Here, I will paraphrase something the Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Armenia, Armen Nurbekyan, said during our visit to Abu Dhabi:
“The development of capital markets is like putting together Lego pieces—you put banks, investment companies, government bonds, private sector bonds, and then the equity market.” It seems like we are at the stage where we have most of the pieces in place, and now the one that we have to place on top is the equity market. Hopefully, we will get there in a couple of years. We are a small country and our market lacks depth, which means that we are also missing some other instruments like interest rate swaps, and other derivatives. I hope we will get there by 2030 and we are working hard to position Cube Invest as the top investment company in the country at that time.
