Cosaic, the data visualisation and smart desktop technology vendor, has sold its ChartIQ data visualisation business to S&P Global, the credit ratings, benchmarks and analytics provider.
The acquisition, which closed on January 1, 2023, will form part of the S&P Global Market Intelligence division. ChartIQ’s data visualisation capabilities will now be added to the S&P Capital IQ Pro platform, to its digital investment solution Markit Digital, and to other workflow solutions. S&P Global will license the ChartIQ charting packages both on a standalone basis and as part of their integrated solutions.
Cosaic has also spun off its desktop interoperability platform Finsemble as a standalone business under the leadership of its original founders, Dan Schleifer and Terry Thorsen, securing a new round of funding from investors including Citi North America, Illuminate Financial Management, Digital+ Partners, AFG Partners, as well as the two founders.
“We’ve been thinking about when and whether to separate the two businesses for a long time,” says Dan Schleifer, CEO and Co-Founder of Cosaic. “The ChartIQ client base looks very different to the Finsemble one. They’ve always been separate technology stacks, separate intellectual property, and run internally as separate business units. They were on different trajectories, so this is about allowing each to really go and reach its own maximum. When S&P Global came along, it made sense because we could see that it would be a perfect home for ChartIQ. And it also made sense to fund Finsemble separately to enable us to go after what we see is a huge opportunity in interoperability.”
Finsemble provides the ability to seamlessly integrate multiple applications across the desktop through desktop interoperability. Clients can connect any type of application – whether modern or legacy, in-house or third-party – to create automated workflows between technologies such as their OEMS, market data workstation, blotters, CRM and analytics apps. In the last year, the company has seen a 100% increase in buy side clients and a tripling of sell sides and vendor clients. The Finsemble product was also named “Most Innovative Smart Trader Desktop & Workflows” at A-Team’s 2022 Innovation Awards.
“Desktop interoperability has become a big buzzword in the industry and a movement in its own right, but it’s still very much in its infancy,” says Schleifer. “If you look at adoption across both the sell side and the buy side, we’ve seen explosive growth within the Finsemble business, not just in the front office, but moving into the middle and back office, as well as into adjacent areas like wealth management, even other parts of financial institutions that are not focused on capital markets. This problem of application overload amongst knowledge workers is not unique to sales, trading and portfolio managers. It really is pervasive across the industry. More and more firms are experiencing the benefits of implementing a smart desktop and spreading its footprint. That’s why, as well as lots of new clients onboarding Finsemble, we’re seeing huge growth within our existing customers as they roll it out across different departments or other functional areas of their organisations.”
Neither the terms of the deal with S&P Global nor the size of the Finsemble investment round have been disclosed. The Cosaic brand will now be retired.
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