Quodd Buy Creates ‘Full-Function’ Data Business for Acquisitive Financeware

Wealth management technology provider Financeware is merging its VMS fund data vendor subsidiary with recent acquisition Quodd Financial Information Services, a Jersey City, NJ-based provider of data terminals and datafeeds, to offer a “fully functioning” data vendor solution to its core wealth management customers and expand its client base to other front-office roles.

The combined business, which will be merged under the Quodd brand, will include Quodd’s real-time international data offerings and VMS’ pricing coverage of US mutual funds, including net asset values, dividend and corporate action announcements, daily accrual factors, and dividend calendars.

Financeware completed the acquisition on December 20, and has spent the interim integrating the assets before announcing the deal earlier this week. The deal followed a data partnership between the vendors, under which Financeware sourced data from Quodd to support its global equities and foreign exchange data service, which—including other datasets sourced from Exchange Data International—comprises a securities master file with corporate actions and dividend data covering 60,000 global equities, 5,500 exchange-traded funds, FX rates for 168 currencies, and American depository receipts, alongside fixed income evaluated pricing and reference data.

However, Financeware quickly decided that it wanted full ownership of the data and the expertise behind sourcing it, and decided to acquire Quodd.

“We are trying to build out a wealth platform with modern capabilities… and to do that, we needed Quodd’s infrastructure within our overall business. And Dennis [Quodd president Dennis Cassidy] brings a level of technical expertise that we haven’t had in the organization,” says Financeware CEO Kevin Rafferty. “If you look at Quodd’s client base of wealth management firms and brokers… it aligns well with the services we are trying to provide to that market around funds, equities, and fixed income.”

In addition to providing additional content, Quodd’s real-time capabilities will enable VMS to provide its existing data in a more timely manner, instead of producing valuations only on end-of-day data, Cassidy says.

“One attraction of the acquisition is that it brings us into the front office… and so from the back office to the front office, we can now cover those relationships across large global organizations,” Rafferty says.

For Quodd, the deal brings the stability of being part of a larger company with a bigger balance sheet, Cassidy adds.

And the vendor plans to grow that balance sheet further over coming years. “Our focus is on the wealth management space, and we will continue to acquire companies in that space, as well as looking at others outside it,” Rafferty says. “We will be much bigger, we hope, over the next five years.”

Though Rafferty—who spent 20 years at SunGard between 1992 and 2012—says the company isn’t looking to recreate SunGard, several of Financeware’s management team are also SunGard alumni, while its board boasts Jim Ashton, former CEO of SunGard Financial Systems—now general partner of Financeware’s private equity holding company NewSpring Holdings, which is also an investor in ticker plant and feed handler vendor Exegy—as well as former Nasdaq CEO and SunGard EVP Bob Greifeld, and former Nasdaq CIO Anna Ewing.

Rafferty says he originally tried to buy VMS while at SunGard, then after leaving the vendor was approached by Ashton to build out Financeware’s platform, using VMS as the basis for creating a broader data toolkit.