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R E V I E W
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M E R G E R S
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A C Q U I S I T I O N S ]
Notable mentions
W
hile there was hardly much
of a sustained spending
spree by any one firm throughout
the trading or FinTech markets,
Liquidnet did complete a couple
of interesting deals this year. First
it acquired institutional research
marketplace and aggregator
RSRCHXchange in May, ex-
panding its platform to provide
its significant client base with
access to global market research,
an area that has been shaken up
since the introduction of research
unbundling under MiFID II in
Europe, even in the American and
Asian regions. Liquidnet followed
that deal with the acquisition of
natural language processing (NLP)
specialist, Prattle, a month later.
Having acquired NLP vendor
OTAS Technologies in 2017,
Liquidnet clearly views that factor
of artificial intelligence technol-
ogy as a lucrative growth area for
its clients, and alongside its deal
for RSRCHXchange, is targeting
some of the most important mar-
ket changes among the buy-side
through its acquisitions.
Refinitiv has been in the thick of
the M&A space in Q3 this year but
also completed an acquisition of
its own in June, adding a valu-
able link to its buy-side offering
through the purchase of order
management specialist (OMS),
Alphadesk. Terms of the deal were
not made public, but the missing
element of Refinitiv’s portfolio of
tools for buy-side traders was filled
by the addition of multi-asset and
multi-currency OMS capabilities.
As well as slotting neatly in with
Refinitiv’s cloud-based approach,
the OMS will be integrated with its
existing REDI execution platform
and flagship Eikon desktop, to form
what Refinitiv calls its end-to-end
offering.
Not to be left out of the exchange
M&A merry-go-round this year,
Deutsche Börse closed its acqui-
sition of analytics firm Axioma
in mid-September, to form the
interestingly named new busi-
ness division, Qontigo. The new
intelligence division incorporates
Axioma’s portfolio construction
and risk analytics tools with the ex-
change operator’s indices STOXX
and DAX, and aims to address what
the German exchange operator
views as key issues for the industry,
covering the rise of passive invest-
ing and smart beta, new technology
infrastructure for scale, and the
shift towards customisation of
services.
Issue 61 // TheTradeNews.com // 75