FIS acquires large stake in Virtus Partners 08 January 2020London Reporter: Maddie Saghir
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FIS has officially closed the acquisition of a majority interest in Virtus Partners, which is set to enable FIS to connect the full lending value chain across the buy and sell sides.
The acquisition is set to round out its asset class coverage and enhance its expertise in the credit market.
Andrew Bateman, senior vice president, capital market solutions, buy-side at FIS, commented: “Virtus is a rapidly growing, leading provider of high-value managed services and technology solutions focused on the credit and loan markets.”
“The addition of its credit and loan market offerings helps expand our capital markets portfolio and enables us to connect the full lending value chain across the buy and sell sides.”
In terms of why FIS chose to acquire Virtus Partners, Bateman said: “We are always looking to enhance the services that we can offer to our customers. In the capital market space, we have grown to have a very strong position not in just technology but increasingly in additional services to our customers.”
“If you add in the Virtus portfolio, it is going to bring new solutions, services and talent. It is going to enhance our existing offerings for our customers and will further strengthen our unique position to enable investors traders, insurers, risk managers around the world to effectively move, manage and grow money in securities.”
Discussing the main benefits of the acquisition, Bateman explained that Virtus is bringing a high-value business process as a service and front-to-back technology.
“This fits in nicely with our strategic growth of having a technology-driven business process service offering,” Bateman said.
According to Bateman, the credit market is one of the fastest-growing spaces, he cited: “We have a strong presence already as far as our customer base in private equity, hedge funds and asset managers who are investing in this market. It does enable us to go a little bit further than that because it also fills in some of the critical gaps that we have in our portfolio and it enables us to connect the full lending value chain across both the buy and sell side.”
“This is because, where we have investors investing in this credit space, we are also providing solutions that enable our customers to originate loans. This nicely brings together both the buy and sell side and enhances our expertise in the credit space,” Batemen stated.
For FIS’ 2020 pipeline, Bateman noted that FIS is continuing to build upon the successes that it’s had of getting its solutions across the broad capital market space and building on those solutions to offer greater services.
Bateman continues: “This is either through technology and innovation where we are modernising our platforms and leveraging emerging technologies on our platform and providing more of those platforms as SaaS type solutions leveraging the public cloud in certain markets as well.”
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