UPDATE: Canadian Data Vets Found CFSI Advisory, Development Firm; Win Activ Canadian Distribution Deal

Collaborative Financial Services Inc (CFSI) was founded in March by data industry veterans Jim Davies, Will Kennedy and Dave Mulder, who serve as managing partner, sales and marketing partner and chief information officer, respectively, who began setting up the company at the start of this year.

Davies was most recently president and chief executive of data and trading systems provider Iress Canada, and has held senior sales and management roles at Reuters America and Reuters Canada, Kasten Chase Applied Research, Standard & Poor's, and was president and CEO of Dow Jones Telerate Canada. Kennedy was most recently executive vice president of business development at Activ Financial, prior to which he was head of business development at hardware ticker plant vendor Exegy, was head of data products at Standard & Poor's Indexes, and head of research sales and business development at ITG, while Mulder has worked with both before, as vice president and chief technology officer of Iress Canada under Davies, prior to which he held the same role at ITG, overlapping with Kennedy, prior to which he was VP and CTO at Kasten Chase.

The company will provide four main services: First, it will create partnerships with domestic and international companies across the spectrum of financial markets information─each of which will be the only company in its specific segment that the firm will represent─while also creating interaction between partner companies, allowing them to leverage each other's products and services to expand their own offerings.

The first such partner is Activ, for which CFSI will provide a dedicated local sales presence, pre-sales technical consulting, contract facilitation─though the contracts will be directly with Activ, which will act as vendor-of-record for its data─client account management, as well as implementations and implementation consulting, as well as local product marketing and contributing feedback to local product development.

Activ, which already has a "strong and growing" client base in Canada, previously distributed its services locally via another, unnamed partner, but ended that relationship last year to pursue a more aggressive focus on the region than its existing partnership would allow, says Activ president Frank Piasecki.

"At that point, we had the decision of whether to go direct into Canada and hire personnel or engage a partner, and Jim is such a unique asset in the Canadian market, with his experience, relationships, reputation and knowledge. It's one thing to hire a salesperson or agent, but it's hard to find people with this level of expertise who are also experienced in using our product," Piasecki says, citing Kennedy's time at Activ, and Davies and Mulder's experience with Activ's feeds and API as customers of the data, which populated Iress' trading terminals.

"We still may hire directly in Canada in future. This relationship doesn't preclude us from entering the market directly─but through this relationship, Activ will have a Canadian focus unique from any other vendor," Piasecki says, adding that as the only real-time data provider that CFSI will partner with, the agreement represents an opportunity to up-sell to new client bases via CFSI's other partners, and via any proprietary solutions that CFSI develops based on those partners' services or Activ's data.

"[Other partners] would be products that our customers in the capital markets are already using, but which will be better off with access to Activ data," Mulder says. "These technologies and solutions, when combined with other parties, will create more valuable solutions.... The more functionally-compatible our partners are, the more attractive they are for us and for them. Customers who use these technologies today are often forced to perform the integration, which can be a lot of work for the customer-but we will do that behind the scenes for our partners."

CFSI's second line of business will be to develop its own solutions─such as a variety of analytical tools─based on its partners' products, which the company can enhance to create distinct solutions of its own, and sell to customers at end-user firms.

Its third effort will be enlisting associates─individuals with development and consulting expertise across a broad range of areas─to support its clients, while the fourth area will be to provide high-level advisory services on how companies can gain traction in the Canadian market.

"We saw a real opportunity to help companies coming into Canada... like entering any new country, you have to learn how that country works. But we realized that to be successful, we would need to add resources," Davies says, referring to the associates that CFSI will enlist, beyond which the company will expand as required by business demands.