Post Acquisition, Gresham Looks to Integrate Inforalgo to Improve CAT Offering

Reconciliations, banking integration, and cash management solutions provider Gresham Technologies is planning to streamline its offering for the consolidated audit trail (CAT), following its recent acquisition of data integration specialist Inforalgo.

Pre-acquisition, Gresham was providing internal data quality checks prior to reporting around completeness, accuracy, and timeliness of the data. The addition Inforalgo will help Gresham to improve how data is acquired and published to the CAT system, which wasn’t available on Gresham’s flagship platform, Clareti, previously. But as with any acquisition, the two companies need to streamline areas where services are duplicated, as there are two different installers, management consoles, and configuration experiences.

“Although we [Gresham and Inforalgo] have very similar philosophies and design approaches, you would feel as though you were in two different products,” says Gresham CTO Neil Vernon. “The seams between those two different products are obvious and at times, just like with any connectivity between any two products, those seams are the weak points.”  

Working with two different vendor applications increases complexity in terms of connectivity and costs, he adds.

Vernon says the integration of Inforalgo’s technology with Gresham’s Clareti platform—which allows users to control non-standardized data—will provide a single product to the market. The integration will happen incrementally, Vernon says, but he did not give a specific timeline.

“The difference that you will have in six months’ time [or] in 12 months’ time, is that you will have one installer, not two; there will be one management console, not two,” he says.  

The CAT, a trading database mandated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, is intended to help regulators track all US activity in listed equities and options. Broker-dealers had to start reporting data to the CAT in phased deadlines beginning in June.

To help support its tier-1 bank clients’ CAT reporting needs, Gresham needed to grow its service through acquisition. Inforalgo provides e-trading and real-time regulatory reporting automation that has connectivity to trading venues like exchanges and multilateral trading facilities (MTFs). Firms were already using Inforalgo’s solutions for reporting requirements to CAT, among other regulations. 

Since acquiring Inforalgo, Gresham can help clients with data acquisition, perform validations before the data goes to the regulator, and connect to the CAT.