Netik, the data management company acquired by private equity firm Symphony Technology Group in 2008, has rebranded as CoreOne Technologies to reflect its new lease of life as a data creation, processing and distribution company with products based on Netik technologies and repurposed proprietary capital markets platforms.
The brand change has been led by CoreOne CEO Rob Flatley, who was appointed by Symphony to take charge of the company in April 2010 and was formerly global head of e-trading at Deutsche Bank. He explains: “The Netik brand is about 15 years old. Originally, Netik provided middleware, then it moved on to data management. Over the past two years, I have been implementing a different business model that uses Netik technology and repurposed proprietary platforms. We rebranded as there is little left of Netik. The CoreOne name reflects our core activities and the market focus on IT economics since the financial crisis.”
CoreOne includes three divisions supported by operational centres in New York, London, Santa Clara, Hong Kong and Bangalore, and a global infrastructure housing eight data centres. VistaOne Solutions is the company’s most recent offering. It builds on the acquisition in May 2011 of CorrectNet, a data delivery business that hosts portals for firms wanting to automate data governance and entitlement. The business combines lightweight data delivery provided by CorrectNet with mature data management from Netik. To date, VistaOne services about 275 portals and 500,000 users from firms including fund administrators, hedge funds and asset managers.
The second business, DeltaOne Solutions, was set up two years ago to manage and deliver global index and exchange traded funds data to trading and investment management firms seeking accurate product pricing and transparency of composite products. CoreOne claims about 85 clients for this data service.
The third business, PrimeOne Solutions, was also set up two years ago and provides end-to-end hosted prime brokerage applications. This solution is based on the early 2011 acquisition of Barclays Capital’s prime brokerage and equity financial platform. From Barclays Capital’s point of view, the platform became redundant when it acquired Lehman’s brokerage services and migrated clients to the Lehman platform.
“We acquired the platform and turned it into a software company,” says Flatley, whose experience at Deutsche Bank and, before that, Bank of America, touched on many aspects of the prime broker business. “A prime broker can either build or buy technology. Tier one prime brokers spend millions of dollars building technology. We offer a mature and robust hosted solution that prime brokers can buy from us.”
To date PrimeOne has attracted five clients, but this number is expected to climb as firms rationalise their cost bases. PrimeOne also provides a blueprint for CoreOne’s ongoing activities. Flatley explains: “Our key strategy and differentiator is to lift out proprietary structures and repurpose them as industry platforms. We look across firms for frameworks and platforms that we could repurpose and host. Our aim is high growth, but not necessarily through high growth in research and development.”
Flatley says CoreOne is in conversation with a number of organisations about buying platforms that are not a differentiator or are too expensive to run. “Many firms are willing to have the conversation because they could achieve a lower cost base and receive some money, but most don’t have a process in place to sell a platform. We know the sectors we want to get into so we talk to companies with the technologies or platforms we could found a solution on,” he says.
With a view to working in growth markets, CoreOne is looking for technologies and platforms in private wealth management. It is also looking for knowledge services, such as specialised research that is too difficult for an organisation to monetise in house, but could work as a third party service. “We could transform such services into good data products,” comments Flatley.
While PrimeOne is the only repurposed platform in the public domain, Flatley says the firm has concluded other lift outs and will talk about its next solution, which will be in the swaps market, in a few weeks time.
As well as developing new business strategy since his arrival at CoreOne, Flatley, who is also an equity investor in the firm, has delivered 150% revenue growth. He won’t detail actual revenue, but is no doubt looking for further growth as he oversees an increase of 25% to 30% in the company’s headcount of 300 this year.
The renaming of Netik marks the end of a career for the brand. Netik completed a buyout of the Bank of New York Mellon’s Netik data warehousing business in February 2008, simultaneously acquiring Capco Reference Data Services from Capco. The whole transaction was underpinned by an investment from Symphony, which took a majority stake in Netik and now, with management, owns 100% of CoreOne Technologies.
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