London dealing systems vendor royalblue has signed a conditional agreement to acquire UK-based LatentZero, a privately-held provider of front office software to buy-side institutions, for a total consideration of £63 million.Royalblue said in February that it was seeking an acquisition to expand its business with the buy-side and cater for new financial instruments.
The deal comprises of an initial payment of £38 million and an additional consideration of £25 million depending on the performance of LatentZero during calendar years 2007 and 2008.
Founded in 1999 LatentZero has offices in headquarters in London and Boston, offices in New York, Frankfurt and Paris. The company's Capstone product - which comprises of its Tesseract portfolio management application, Minerva order management and trading system and Sentinel investment compliance system - is used by nine of the world's ten largest asset managers.
Commenting on the LatentZero takeover, Chris Aspinwall, chief executive of royalblue, says: "This transaction delivers on royalblue's well documented strategy to provide the best products and services to both the buy-side and sell-side communities."
The vendor says the acquisition provides "considerable strategic benefit to royalblue, LatentZero and their respective customers by providing, for the first time, the potential for true integration of multi-asset buy-side and sell-side trading flows".
Royalblue is planning to change its name to Fidessa next month in a bid to capitalise on the take-up of its core trading system and build a global brand.
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