NeoXam is moving into the enterprise data management market dominated by the likes of Markit, Asset Control and AIM Software following its acquisition of SmartCo and its flagship products DataHub, a reference data management platform, and IBOR, an investment book of records providing a single source of up-to-date positions. NeoXam plans to use the SmartCo platform not only to support its front, middle and back-office investment management solutions, but also to provide a springboard for additional services.

The cost of the acquisition, which sees one French firm consume another, has not been disclosed, but it adds 20 SmartCo customers, including a core group in the US, to NeoXam’s 140 worldwide customers. All SmartCo’s employees will transfer to NeoXam, taking the company’s total to 400 employees worldwide, although it plans to push the number up to 450 by the end of this year. Pascal Mougin, SmartCo president and founder of the company in 2004, will join NeoXam’s executive committee, and SmartCo customers will continue to be supported. NeoXam expects 2015 revenues, taking into account the acquisition, to reach €50 million.

Serge Delpla, NeoXam president, says the company was looking to strengthen its position as a provider of cost-efficient asset management software solutions, and recognising the increasing strategic importance of data management in the asset management industry, decided SmartCo would be a good fit for the company’s strategy.  

He explains: “NeoXam will use SmartCo’s reference technical platform and IBOR to help streamline the architecture at its customer sites. For example, SmartCo DataHub can be used as a security master file and to support other reference data required by back-office systems such as NeoXam’s NX GP3 investment accounting solution. It can also be used with front-office systems such as NX Manager, our investment management solution, and NX Density, our modular portfolio management solution.

“This expanded business spectrum of best-of-breed investment operations applications provides a compelling alternative suite of client driven, cost effective and configurable solutions that compete directly against the monolithic offerings that some software providers are trying to impose on the market.”

From SmartCo’s perspective, Mougin says: “This acquisition is perfectly aligned with SmartCo’s technology platform and business functionality strategy. After revenues increased by 100% in two years, the company needed to partner with a larger organisation that could accelerate our delivery of best-in-class solutions and has the capacity to achieve global ambitions required by our Tier 1 clients. To build on and expand our sales successes in the US, we need an offensive sales strategy that can now be fully executed with NeoXam.”