Investmaster Group Limited, owned by Canadian investment management company AGF Management Limited, has been acquired by Burns e-Commerce Solutions Ltd.
The acquisition comes at a time when the wealth management market is experiencing a continued period of buoyancy and growth. Burns sees great potential for Investmaster and a synergy to utilise its own products and services to provide a broader wealth service proposition, and deliver significant growth to the business.
The new owner-management team all hold significant track records in the financial IT industry. Peter Little, Chief Executive of Burns and previously a founder of Braid, takes the Chief Executive position at Investmaster; John Dallas, joint founder of consultancy firm CSTIM and Non-Executive Partner of Morse, joins the company as Chairman.
Burns' Business Exchange Service manages £25 billion of transactions on behalf of a number of multi-national corporations and their European and Global supply chains. The deal will see Burns further enhancing Investmaster's InVantage product set with the introduction of its process automation technologies and software as a service (SaaS) delivery techniques. The intention is to broaden Investmaster's proposition with this technology.
At the same time regulation continues to drive significant change across the industry with MiFID coming into force in November. Burns technologies have been developed and adapted for the regulatory environment, and support Investmaster's compliance functionality for data exchange and integrity.
Peter Little comments, "We see this as a significant opportunity to grow a business operating in a burgeoning market space, that has an exemplary track record, high quality wealth management products and highly experienced employees."
"The synergy between the two companies is technology based. Both organisations support and assist companies operating in environments that are manually intensive, paper-based and heavily regulated. We see great opportunity to combine the expertise and technology in these areas to bring new innovation to the wealth management market."
Blake C. Gokoke C. Goldring Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at AGF Management Ltd comments, "We have a continuing interest in Investmaster's future success, not only as a consequence of this transaction, but also through our shareholding in Smith & Williamson who will continue to be an important user of Investmaster's products. Our experience with Peter Little and his team give us great confidence that under their management the company will continue to flourish and reap the rewards of recent investments in the InVantage product set and also accelerate the company's growth through the introduction of the Burns technology."