Source: State Street
State Street Corporation (NYSE: STT) today announced that it has completed its acquisition of Charles River Systems, Inc. (Charles River Development).
The combination of State Street and Charles River Development will enable the industry’s first-ever global interoperable platform connecting the front, middle and back office with one provider. This platform, supported by deep enterprise data management capabilities, will accelerate investment workflows, provide advanced data aggregation, analytics and compliance tools, and connect and exchange data with other industry platforms and providers.
“The combination of State Street and Charles River Development will create an open platform that will standardize data and systems across multiple asset classes and the entire investment lifecycle. We are delighted to welcome the more than 700 talented employees who join State Street today and look forward to working with the Charles River Development clients to support their current and future business needs,” said Jay Hooley, chairman and CEO of State Street.
State Street also announced today the establishment of a Charles River Development Client Advisory Board to provide ongoing strategic input into the platform development, engage with peers across the industry, as well as shape new products and solutions aligned with market and industry trends. Jenny Tsouvalis, senior vice president and enterprise head of investment reporting, operations and applications for OMERS Administration Corporation, will chair the advisory board.
“I have worked closely with State Street and Charles River Development, and I am excited about the opportunity to chair this new client advisory board,” said Tsouvalis. “From the inception of our relationship with Charles River Development, the functionality has grown each year expanding and offering both front- and middle-office business solutions that we have taken advantage of and implemented. The acquisition by State Street creates a deeper platform to develop additional workflow features and integration to support the front, middle and back offices. As a client, we see this as an opportunity to further grow the product and increase with expanded innovative capabilities.”
John Plansky has been named CEO of Charles River Development. Plansky has led State Street’s Global Exchange business for the last 18 months, where he oversaw the launch of a number of front-office solutions including Verus, investible indices and DataGX(SM), State Street’s end-to-end data warehousing solution. As a former partner at PwC and Booz & Co. and CEO of Nervewire, Plansky has a history of leading global teams, growing businesses and integrating teams with different expertise and skill sets. State Street will also continue to benefit from the years of experience that Charles River Development’s founder, Peter Lambertus, brings as he transitions into a planned new role as strategic consultant to the firm.
A new study conducted by Longitude Research for State Street that analyzes asset managers’, owners’ and insurance companies’ sentiments about growth prospects finds that data and technology are increasingly important, with more than 42 percent of survey respondents viewing the development of new tools to achieve an investment advantage as an urgent priority. The global study of more than 500 investment industry executives also found that the ability to extract better insights from data is a key consideration for improvement, and strengthening risk analytics was cited by 43 percent of respondents as a top outcome their technology investment must deliver over the next year. Furthermore, nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of asset managers in the study are investing in new performance analytics tools.