After Acquisitions, Broadridge Looks to Expand Continental Europe Fund Comms Business

In 2018 Broadridge Financial Solutions acquired Dublin-based FundAssist, a regulatory, marketing, and sales solutions services provider. It followed that deal with the acquisition of UK-based FundsLibrary, a fund document and data dissemination vendor. Broadridge has since merged the two together to form Fund Communication Solutions.

With this foundation now in place, Broadridge will next look to grow its fund communication business “quickly and effectively” into continental Europe, says Philip Taliaferro, head of strategy for Europe and Asia-Pacific. 

The digital platform provides fund data, documents, and regulatory reporting services, and provides basic information for investors wanting to know, say, how risky a particular fund is. While an investor can pull up a 100-page prospectus on a fund, they may only want a one- or two-page document that explains what the fund is all about, Taliaferro says.

FundsLibrary provides management of that data and dissemination of information, as a large proportion of its client base are fund distributors. FundAssist, on the other hand, works to perform calculations, create regulatory documents, and completes templates required for reporting purposes.

“Our approach is that we want to be a one-stop-shop for all of that data and the regulatory reporting associated with it,” Taliaferro says.

The firm recently signed a large fund distribution platform to be their provider for these services in continental Europe. That deal has not been publicly announced, but Taliaferro says the platform is a very material player in the fund distribution space in the region. He also says that Broadridge’s expectation is to use the partnership as the glue to drive growth for both the distribution side and the asset management side of the solution following the FundAssist and FundsLibrary acquisitions.

“We are making great progress in integrating the data models between the two businesses,” Taliaferro says.

Through this setup, Broadridge will take in various raw inputs so as to strike a net asset value (NAV), provide position information, give detail into overall holdings, and then distribute that information to the necessary recipients on behalf of the fund.  This data is stored on a private cloud. In January, Broadridge Financial Solutions announced it had partnered with IBM to build the Broadridge Private Cloud so as to modernize Broadridge’s infrastructure to provide automated private cloud services for critical workloads, while adding velocity and scale.