Markit is back on the acquisition trail with this week’s announcement that it has agreed to acquire Information Mosaic, a provider of corporate actions and post-trade securities processing software – but Information Mosaic may not be Markit’s only acquisition interest as we have heard it is considering buying another well known data management company.
Financial terms of the acquisition of Dublin-based Information Mosaic have not been disclosed, but the deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2015. Markit bills the acquisition as a means of extending its corporate actions service and enhancing its asset servicing solutions, but the main prize has to be Information Mosaic’s IMActions application. This is a sophisticated end-to-end corporate actions processing solution that should dovetail nicely with Markit Corporate Actions, a service that provides validated corporate actions data on 3 million cross-asset securities and is the result of Markit’s June 2013 acquisition of DTCC’s Global Corporate Actions Validation Service.
Michele Trogni, managing director and cohead of the Solutions division at Markit, says: “Information Mosaic is known for its leadership in corporate actions, a critical, complex and challenging area of operational risk for many financial institutions. The combination of deep domain expertise, data and technology assets created by the acquisition will position Markit as a leading provider of end-to-end corporate actions services.”
Aside form IMActions, Markit will acquire Information Mosaic’s IMSecurities post-trade securities processing solution, which includes IMConnection, a tool that provides a consolidated and client centric view of data across a business, and IMAnalytics, a business intelligence tool that combines a search engine and visualisation to allow business users to query post-trade data and create reports. Last but not least is IMBridge, an enterprise service bus that can be used to integrate data and services in an existing information ecosystem.
Markit plans to integrate Information Mosaic into its Solutions division, which houses the company’s enterprise software and services including Markit Enterprise Data Management, a business based on the company’s June 2012 acquisition of Cadis Software. Cadis CEO Daniel Simpson moved across to Markit and became head of enterprise software, but left the company in January 2015 to take the role of CEO at Livingstone Technology, a software asset management specialist.
While Markit is expected to take on Information Mosaic’s 200 employees, who are based primarily in Dublin and New Delhi, it is not clear if the senior leadership team led by CEO and chairman Ulrich Kunz will make the transfer as Markit states that Information Mosaic will be led by Paul Taylor – himself a newcomer to Markit this month – as managing director reporting to Trogni.
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