WealthManagement.com's tech columnist Davis Janowski adds context and history to the Mediant acquisition by BetaNXT.
Written by: Davis Janowski
Even for someone who has followed the advisor technology sector for many years, it can be a challenge to keep up with what has been broken up, sold off, digested or reconstituted into pairings with something else.
Take, for example, the latest move by private equity firms Motive Partners and Clearlake Capital, which this week announced the acquisition of the investor communications firm Mediant Communications.
While terms of the deal were not disclosed, Mediant has long been a provider of investor communications technology to banks, brokers, corporations, funds and investment managers, competing with proxy behemoth Broadridge.
Advisors might be familiar with Mediant as well for offerings like its Advisor Mailbox, rolled out in 2012, that could keep advisors updated ahead of mailings to clients (if their broker/dealers were users of the software).
Some might also recall that Mediant last year agreed to settle a class action lawsuit following an April 2019 data breach, which exposed the personal information of 225,000 people. Some 1,100 had made claims in the suit, and the company ultimately agreed to pay up to $10,000 to each as reimbursement for expenses related to the breach.
Now, Mediant’s technology will join the three pieces Clearlake and Motive acquired a year ago for $1.1 billion from Refinitiv, a part of the London Stock Exchange Group (at which time a strategic partnership between the private equity firms and LSEG was also announced).
Last year’s acquisitions included the BETA, Maxit and Digital Investor products, which, in addition to having been owned by Refinitiv, had previously been parts of Scivantage and Thomson Reuters.
BETA is used for securities processing as part of clearing and custody operations, while Maxit is used for tracking cost and tax basis data on assets.
Sometime during the past year, BETA and Maxit were combined under and renamed as part of the BetaNXT platform, to which Mediant has now been added.
What was old seems new again. The platform already had plenty of existing users, of course, including Wells Fargo Advisors and Janney Montgomery Scott. And the firms state BetaNXT “supports more than 50 million retail accounts, has more than $6 trillion of assets on the platform, and processes more than 35 million securities-related transactions daily.”
For its part, Mediant touts on its website that it supports more than 70 million shareholders and has processed more than 52 billion share votes on its platform.
Source: Wealth Management Magazine