Computershare Limited (Australia: CPU) today announced it has completed purchase of the assets of the internet-based data reporting service absreports.com from Mourant Limited, the Jersey-based professional services firm.
The deal supports Computershare's objective to introduce a new array of fixed-income products that will complement existing services available in the marketplace as well as complement the company's expanding global fixed-income offerings.
absreports.com is a leading provider of detailed participant and transaction performance-related data to the European Securitization Industry. Launched in 2001, absreports.com catalogues activity for more than 1,100 asset-backed, mortgage-backed and collateralized debt obligation financings. Subscribers have access to information for more than 4,000 deal participants, the flexibility to drill into issue-level detail for more than 4,000 securities and the ability to track their investments via access to more than 7,500 performance based reports.
Mark F. Ferraris, President of Computershare's Global Fixed Income Services Group, said, "absreports.com has established itself as an industry standard for ease of navigation and quality of content. By bringing this platform into the Computershare family and leveraging our unique approach to developing and enhancing technology products, we can provide our new clients and the larger market with even better access to deal-level data and much greater transparency."
Ferraris added, "We believe this transaction represents a great example of our strategy to position Computershare as a key service provider to the structured finance and other fixed-income markets. We intend to build a broad offering to support companies, investors and existing mainstream service providers."
In the coming months, Computershare intends to add new features and additional content to absreports.com and to broaden the appeal of the product to other important structured finance markets.
Nicola Davies, Chief Executive of Mourant Limited, said, "absreports.com was created as a complementary service to Mourant's range of advisory and administration services for the asset-backed securitization industry. We are extremely proud of its progress since 2001. It has made a significant contribution to the transparency of the European ABS industry and has become the benchmark for ABS performance reporting. Our focus is now on the international expansion of our core businesses in the securitization market."
Separately, Computershare Markets Technology and Cicada today announced the signing of an agreement to jointly market each others' products to the world's leading stock and derivatives exchanges and OTC market providers.
Under the agreement, Cicada and Computershare will jointly market to their existing and future clients Computershare's X-stream, the world's most advanced and highest performance exchange matching system, and the real-time configuration of Cicada's Composer® plus+, the world's leading market data management platform.
This alliance demonstrates the companies' strategies to work with other advanced software houses that share the same commitment to innovation and to helping exchanges increase revenue and reduce their total cost of technology ownership. Through this joint marketing agreement for Computershare's X-stream and Cicada's Composer® plus+, together with Computershare's SMARTS market supervision and surveillance software, exchanges will now have access to a full suite of leading products, conveniently delivered through one channel.
At the signing, Peter Jessup, MD of Computershare Markets technology said, "In an environment of increasing competition, exchanges are looking to manage their data more effectively as a means of increasing revenue. We believe that our current clients can benefit enormously from this agreement by bringing in Cicada's advanced real-time data management technology, already in use by major global exchanges."
Echoing the comments, Hubert Holmes, Managing Director of Cicada said "This co-operation just makes sense. We have complementary product sets that meet the needs of exchanges around the globe for more effective, efficient trading and market data management. This alliance illustrates the fact that both parties's technologies work well together and can be marketed as a single solution".