Bloomberg LP Moves Into EDM Market, Acquires PolarLake

That's the second acquisition in the product vendor market in the last few weeks - CADIS has been baucht by Markit just recently. I wonder if there is a strategic advantage for the bigger players adding a reference data system to the product portfolio and even more so: why this is happening just now.

American Century Investments selects SimCorp Dimension

Slowly but surely SimCorp acquires more customers in the USA - American Century Investments is the latest deal, and not a small one neither (78 billion AuM).

Fund management: Wasting assets

This very interesting article shows the dynamic of the fund management market world wide, references to the latest acquisition - Blackrock purchases Barclays Global Investors (BGI) - and also gives an outlook of what may come. A must-read for everybody in the industry!

Pioneer Investments implements LatentZero

Pioneer Investments ist implementing LatentZero within a project called GISP, which is "a multi-year project working with various Pioneer business units to develop a standardized global platform for front-office operations including the ability to manage financial instruments and newly created funds by rationalizing the management of corporate data and securities registers".

Amongst the areas being set up is one called PFO (Pioneer Front Office), which takes care of the implementation of LatentZero for order management and investment compliance.

I wonder if the implementation in Germany will work as expected, since this is the first implementation of LatentZero in Germany. And the German investment restrictions are most likely the most complex in the world.

Also, maintaining two rule sets for investment compliance (one for pre-trade in LatentZero and one for post-trade in SimCorp Dimension) can be a massive overhead.

State Street Appointed by Lazard Asset Management to Provide Investment Manager Operations Outsourcing Services

State Street wins this prestigious deal to insource Lazard's investment operations, which includes " trade settlement, portfolio administration, reconciliation, performance composite management, data management and preparation of client reports". I am curious why other back office processes remain at Lazard and why and and where there havedrawn the line...

As a result of this mandate, approximately 70 Lazard employees are expected to transfer to State Street. This remindes me a lot of the SGSS / Pioneer deal in Germany, only that they have outsourced middle and back office completely.

I wonder what kind of implications this has on the German business of Lazard, which still runs V3 in their back office...

SunGard Announces Intention to Acquire GL TRADE

Another mega acquisition by Sungard seems to be a matter of days: Sungard officially made an offer. GL Trade says is makes sense. Wonder what the clients and employees think...

Report on Order Management Systems

This report by CAPIS (Capital Institutional Services), done in 2007, shows a nice overview of funtionalities of Order Management Systems, as well as an overview of them with a detail fact sheet per system.

The report covers systems that have a rather big footprint in the USA and is far from being complete, but the information listed per system is superb although more or less taken from the vendors fact sheets (for most of the given information).

The functionalities being expected in an order management system (from CAPIS' point of view):

• Portfolio Management (normally not an integral part of an OMS but a system group of its own)
  
• Compliance
• Trading
• Fix (considered to be a separate functionality group, in my opinion a general order routing functionality)
• Allocation
  

Systems listed are:

• Advent - Moxy
• SS&C - Antares
• Bloomberg - POMS
• Charles River - CRIMS
• Eze Castle
• Fidessa - LatentZero
• INDATA
• LineData - LongView
• MacGregor - XIP
• Sungard - Asset Arena (formerly known as Decalog)
  

Netik acquires Capco Reference Data Services with private equity investment from Symphony Technology Group

This deal is a little surprising to me, since CapCo has actively marketed the reference data system in Germany, and I wonder if its marketing will be continued since Netik is relatively unknown in Germany. See also here.

Standard Chartered Bank chooses IGEFI MultiFonds ?

According to the latest rumors, Standard Chartered Bank has chosen IGEFI "MultiFonds Fund Accounting" as their new fund accounting solution. This decision seems to be valid for all subsidiaries around the world.

If this will be confirmed, it would prove that IGEFI's strategy of making deals preferably with global players.

IT Spending in Financial Services: A Global Perspective Report Published by Celent

As BobsGuide, BankTech and Waters (amongst many others) report: Celent has released its survey on what financial institutions will spend for their IT.

The report does cover Northern America, Europe and Asia, but sources prediminantly cite the US only.

Bearingpoint Europa will die Trennung vom Mutterhaus

Dieser Schritt, käme er denn zustande, wäre dann doch eine Überraschung, und wieder mal eine einschneidende Veränderung im Beratermarkt, übertroffen nur durch den Niedergang von Arthur Anderson im Zeichen der Enron-Krise und deren Folgen oder die nachfolgenden Abspaltungen der Berater- von den Wirtschaftsprüfungseinheiten.

Dazu Marcel Nickler, Vice President und Leiter von Bearingpoint in Österreich und in der Schweiz: "Wir haben in den vergangenen 18 Monaten mehr Consultants eingestellt, als wir an den Markt verloren haben". Das klingt nach Stolz, ist aber doch eher ein Armutszeugnis. Auch in Deutschland gab es in den letzten Monaten personell Turbulenzen.

Obwohl, so der Artikel: "Im europäischen Bearingpoint-Verbund ist die Region Deutschland, Österreich und Schweiz die größte Einnahmequelle."

Wir werden sehen, ob und wie stark sich die Fluktuation des Personals und die Ertragskrise des Mutterhauses auswirken wird...

Citigroup's acquisition of Bisys strengthens its hand in the lucrative fund-services business

CitiGroup makes a big step forward with their Global Transaction Services group in acquiring Bisys, an Investment Services provider with $815 billion in assets under administration (see also Bloomberg comments).

As the sources say: "With this acquisition, Citi will become a top-three player in transfer agency, fund administration and accounting for U.S. mutual funds." and "In hedge funds area the acquisition positions Citi to compete against top custodians Bank of New York Mellon Corp., State Street Corp. and JPMorgan Worldwide Securities Services."

This means a lot of system migrations, primarily for fund accounting. Since CitiGroup is using MultiFonds, IGEFI will be busy helping CitiGroup to manage the absorption of Bisys assets on its own IT platform.

The U.S. Fund Accounting Systems Review 2007

Barrington delivers yet again a new research on fund accounting systems in the US (the equivalent latest version of their European counterparts is dated 2003).

The following systems were reviewed:

• Eagle Investment Systems- EagleSTAR
• LineData (GIS)- MFACT
• IGEFI- MultiFonds
• SimCorp- SimCorp Dimension
• State Street Bank- PAS
• SunGard LLC- InvestOne

I just wonder why StateStreet PAS (or PAM) is on there - it is not sold to clients (as much as I know), but part of the service offering at StateStreet.

Obviously, two systems that are originated in Europe seam to be able to get enough attention to be on that exclusive but not exhaustive list: MultiFonds and Dimension. I wonder why systems like MPacs (from Phoenix Systems) or Geneva (from Advent) are not on the list (just to name two).

Franklin Templeton Investments Acquires Majority Stake in Riva Financial Systems

Another acquisition that clearly shows the trend to solutions that are able to handle the complexity of multiple jurisdictions which are the prerequisite for global management.

It will be interesting to see how this transaction will influence potential clients to opt for RIVA as their new TA system now that it's being owned by an investment management organisation.

Bank Julius Baer implements internet trading solution from Wall Street Systems

Big deal for Wall Street Systems: Julius Bär has chosen them as their new trading solution.

Financial Services at Bank of New York Mellon Corporation

This pdf gives an overview of the global financial services of The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation

SunGard Acquires Finetix

SunGard continues to acquire smaller software vendors...