TRG Buys Screen, Creating Global Data Cost Management Vendor

The combined vendor will have just over 100 staff (around 50 each from both companies) with offices in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Switzerland, Singapore and New Zealand, and will serve a combined base of more than 300 clients.

Officials say the move was driven by the potential to offer a broader range of products and services, a truly global support presence, and to be able to focus more on strategy and product development than on duplication and competition.

“We always recognized that we were trying to solve the same problems… and doing it in different geographies, and that we both shared the same vision of being a global leader in subscription management,” says TRG CEO Steve Matthews. “We made efforts to grow in continental Europe and Asia, but were limited because of Screen’s success in those regions.”

Meanwhile, Screen found it hard to gain significant traction in the US market, finding itself always behind TRG and MDSL. “It made us think about where we should focus our energy over the next couple of years,” says Screen co-founder and co-CEO Kees Brooimans. “Losing a competitor by combining with TRG will allow us to focus more on strategy. And not having to travel around the world as much will free up time to develop better products.”

The deal closed on Wednesday, January 10, though the companies have held discussions—casual and more serious—for some time. “Soon after I joined TRG, I wanted to understand the landscape, so I reached out to and spent time with Kees and Peter [Screen co-CEO Peter Fruitema]…. So we’ve been talking for three years. Then towards the second half of last year, we felt there was a tremendous opportunity in the marketplace, and that we could be more effective together than separate,” Matthews says, though he adds that the decision was not influenced by rival MDSL’s recent sale to private equity firm Sumeru Equity Partners and merger with telecoms management service provider Telesoft.

A key opportunity that the companies identified is the potential to sell their product sets to different tiers of the financial community, and to cross-pollinate some services that would complement both TRG’s FITS (Financial Information Tracking System) platform and Screen’s InfoMatch system.

“Both FITS and InfoMatch will stay integral to our offering, due to differences in geographies, customer size and complexity. Ultimately, it will give customers more choice,” Matthews says. “But we are getting good traction selling our ResearchMonitor solution [a usage tracking program that originated to serve subscription management issues at law firms] into the FITS community, and we are excited to offer that to InfoMatch clients.”

Meanwhile, Screen had developed the concept of segmented profiles to support its trading floor consulting business, which Brooimans says could easily be integrated into FITS’ inventory management processes, and is also looking at how to productize benchmarking processes for which Screen was already capturing data from its consulting business.

Though the vendor does not plan any staff cuts, the deal will offer opportunities to create combined teams—for example, to create a single, global support model. “Another obvious improvement is in the UK, where TRG is a bit bigger, but our services were complementary. So we can bring those together in the immediate short term to serve that market better than before,” Brooimans says.