Financial Technology, Data, and Analytics

Dear Clients and Friends,

Our August 2019 report on recent m&a transactions, trends, and valuations in the seven segments of the FinTech, Data and Analytics world that we follow and sometimes lead can be found here.

According to Deloitte’s annual study of M&A activity, 73 percent of tech sector executives expect more and bigger deals this year – the highest percentage of any industry. A lot of these deals bear little relevance to our world. Sure, IBM is acquiring RedHat, the open-source enterprise software company for $33 billion; Capgemini is paying $4 billion for Altran; and Broadcom is buying CA Technologies for $18.9 billion.

More relevant to us is Salesforce’s nearly $16 billion deal to buy Tableau, the business intelligence and data visualization company; Google’s $2.6 billion purchase of Looker with its BI capabilities; and, of course, the LSE’s recently announced plan to acquire Refinitiv (formerly, the Markets and Risk business of Thomson Reuters) in a stock transaction valued at about $27 billion including debt.

Among other things that these latter deals have in common (besides scale, tech and growing use of the cloud) is a focus on providing and analyzing data in an effort to predict future outcomes. We wrote about this trend in our February FinTech Market Update when we referred to “The Second Wave”. And these are three more pieces of evidence that it’s coming. The Second Wave is all about aggregating data from multiple sources, applying big data analytics and smart algorithms and a pinch of AI in an effort to better understand the past and thereby predict what will come next. It’s all about the future. We’re going to be seeing a lot more of this.

It’s still a strong market for growing FinTech, data and analytics businesses that have scale or are getting there in a hurry – as you will see by the valuation multiples and number of recent transactions referred to in the attached report. We are pleased to be a part of it.

A few of the more interesting recent FinTech, Data, and Analytic transactions include:

• FNZ (LSE:LSE) agreed to acquire GBST (M&A Client) (Syndey, AUS) for AUD$269mm, valuing the company at an implied 2.9x LTM revenue and 23.6x LTM EBITDA. The deal represents a 94.9% premium to the closing price of the company’s shares on April 11, when Bravura made an initial approach. Read more here.
• Nubank (Sao Paulo, Brazil) raised $400mm in a Series F funding round led by TCV and joined by DST Global, Sequoia Capital and RedPoint ventures at a $10 billion+ valuation
• Curve 1 (London, UK) raised $55mm in a Series B funding round led by Gauss Ventures, valuing the company at $250mm post-money
• DataRobot (Boston, MA) raised $200mm in a Series E funding round led by Meritech Capital and Sapphire Ventures at a valuation of more than $1.0bn
• London Stock Exchange Group plc (LSE:LSE) agreed to acquire Refinitiv for $27 billion in total enterprise value
• Cint (Stockholm, Sweden) acquires P2Sample (M&A Client) (Alpharetta, GA). Read more here

See below for our August FinTech, Data and Analytics M&A Update.