NeoXam has consolidated its acquisitions of the past couple of years, including enterprise data management (EDM) specialist SmartCo, and set out a growth strategy based on the three disciplines of data management, investment management and investment accounting, and extended geographic reach across North America and Asia. The Paris-based company is also developing cloud based on-demand services based on its software solutions and expects to begin rolling these out later this year.
The company’s roots lie in GP3 and Decalog, respectively back-office and front-office asset management solution providers that were founded in the late 1980s by executives who would later be part of NeoXam. GP3 and Decalog were acquired by SunGard in the late 1990s and acquired again in February 2014 as part of the creation of NeoXam by its owners BlackFin Capital Partners and private investors led by NeoXam CEO Serge Depla.
A further flurry of acquisitions followed, bolstering NeoXam’s asset management portfolio and opening the door to capital markets and investment banking markets. In October 2014, the company acquired Density Technologies, a provider of front-to-back office solutions for the buy side that extended its coverage from vanilla listed instruments to wider asset classes including derivatives and private equities.
In April 2015, NeoXam acquired Nexfi, a provider of front-office decision support software for the buy side, and in June 2015, it acquired SmartCo, the enterprise data management software company at the heart of NeoXam’s data centric strategy and the vehicle that would support the company’s business in buy-side markets, but also carry it into sell-side markets.
Didier Roubinet, chief strategy officer at NeoXam, says: “We are a 25-year old startup as the result of our experience with GP3 and Decalog. The acquisitions of Density and Nexfi meant we had many added value solutions, but we then needed underlying technology to manage data acquisition and distribution across all the solutions, so we acquired SmartCo.”
NeoXam renamed SmartCo’s EDM products as NX Data Hub and NX Matching, the first a centralised data hub and the second an ETL layer that supports data reconciliation, data quality and distribution across the company’s solutions as well as best-of-breed third-party solutions. Using what NeoXam calls a Best of Hybrid approach, data can then be consolidated into an IBOR or used for reporting purposes. This approach, and experience acquired with SmartCo, is also being used to bring together facets of asset management and capital markets to deliver a flexible platform that can support both buy- and sell-side needs.
NeoXam goes to market with a flexible EDM platform that can support its own and third-party applications or be retrofitted to existing applications. The company continues to offer individual applications, providing clients with solutions that can be used on a stand-alone basis or integrated with the EDM platform.
Having consolidated the capabilities of its acquisitions, NeoXam is looking ahead and is in the early stages of a four-year plan that will migrate existing and additional value added solutions to a cloud-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. The company is running a demo of on-demand market data with a group of bank clients and expects to follow this with SaaS pricing or reconciliation options later this year.
In the data management market, the company competes with the usual suspects, and as a start-up already has a sizeable client base having acquired about 15 customers with SmartCo, including RBS, Dexia, and Renaissance Capital. It has also won 22 new projects over the past two years, 19 of them with new clients.
Not surprisingly, the company’s strength is in Continental Europe, but it does have plans to open a London office this year and extend its presence in North America by adding a base in San Francisco to offices in Boston and New York. A good start in China with the GP3 back-office product will act as a springboard for the rest of Asia, where the company plans to open an office in Singapore later this year to promote both its data management and component solutions. From a standing start of 250 employees in 2014, the company is expected to grow to around 400 employees this year.
Reviewing NeoXam’s short history, yet extensive experience, Roubinet concludes: “We want to be a data centric company offering mission critical solutions to the asset management and capital markets sectors. And we want to offer the best total cost of ownership.”
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