Deutsche Boerse has finalised its purchase of Clearstream Fund Centre and has now become 100 per cent shareholder of the Zurich-based distribution platform.
This concludes a deal first announced in January 2020, through which Clearstream took ownership of a 51 per cent stake in Fondcenter from UBS. This first tranche of the transaction, which was completed in September 2020, provided an option to acquire the remaining 49% at a later point.
On 6 May 2021, Deutsche Boerse announced that it will acquire these remaining shares in Fondcenter for CHF390 million (US$435 million). UBS indicated that it will remain a long-term strategic partner of Clearstream across the full fund services value chain.
This deal builds on Clearstream’s earlier moves to ramp up its presence in the fund distribution services sector through its purchase of Swisscanto Fund Centre London (SCFL), which was announced publicly in April 2018 and completed six months later.
This added distribution contract management and trailer fee processing to its long-established expertise in execution and fund custody. Its Vestima funds solution is designed to serve as a “one-stop” service for order routing, cash management and consolidated position reporting.
Clearstream has subsequently migrated its erstwhile Fund Desk business (established following its purchase of SCFL) into Clearstream Fund Centre, creating the latter as a “centre of excellence” for global fund distribution support within Deutsche Boerse Group with more than €300 billion assets under administration.
This now serves more than 350 fund distributors and more than 430 asset managers, covering over 72,000 investment funds, according to information sourced from Clearstream.
