NEW YORK & LONDON & HONG KONG--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Options Technology, the leading provider of Capital Markets services, backed by Abry Partners, today announced it has agreed to acquire ACTIV Financial. The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
As a long-term provider of global capital markets services including cloud-enabled managed solutions, global trading infrastructure and telemetry analytics services, this deal reinforces Options' commitment to continually add value and optimize their offering to capital markets firms.
ACTIV Financial are a renowned global provider of real-time, delayed, historical and enriched multi-asset financial market data and offer a wide range of industry-leading solutions in a true Enterprise data platform. The combination of Options' core services will allow clients to bring their mission-critical applications closer to the data source, in essence bringing the query to the data, not the data to the query. In addition, this acquisition further supports Options' growth strategy, allowing clients to benefit from an extensive market data footprint and global trading connectivity built on and supported by best of breed technologies, industry-leading automation and world-class cyber security and monitoring.
"We believe that merging the ACTIV data feed and software capabilities on top of the Options global network and infrastructure is probably the most impactful deal in the sector in the last decade," said Danny Moore, Options' President and Chief Executive Officer. "The industry has been crying out for a true next-generation platform focused on the coming decades, near zero latency, global, on modern hardware, fully Cloud Integrated, and fully backward compatible. Merging our platforms will bring all that and more."
Tomer Yosef-Or, a Partner at Abry, said, "We are very excited to support Options in the acquisition of ACTIV Financial. We are highly impressed by ACTIV Financial's global presence within market data services which has allowed them to develop successful relationships with some of the world's leading financial institutions.
Avery Zuck, a Principal at Abry, said, "The combined Options / ACTIV Financial platform will be able to provide an increasingly comprehensive solution set to our new and existing customers. We are excited to bring this transaction to a close and move forward together in the continued pursuit of being the premier Capital Markets Services provider to the global financial ecosystem."
Steve McNeany, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder at ACTIV Financial, said, "The acquisition of ACTIV Financial by Options is an extremely exciting time in our history, and we are confident this deal will deliver a highly differentiated and competitive offering to both our current clients and the market as a whole. We believe this is the start of a new era in the market data industry providing unparalleled, fully managed market data services globally with our clients set to benefit from a wide range of strategic synergies."
This news comes as the latest in a series of strategic developments for Options, including the Expansion of Ultra Low Latency Hosting Capabilities across JPX, TSE and OSE Markets, their partnership with Packets2Disc to provide market-leading network analytics solutions alongside being selected to support a top-tier investment bank expand its FX footprint across Singapore.
About Options (www.options-it.com):
Options Technology is the No. 1 provider of IT infrastructure to global Capital Markets firms, supporting their operations and ecosystems.
Founded in 1993, the firm began life as a hedge fund technology services provider. Today, the company provides high-performance managed trading infrastructure and cloud-enabled managed services to over 200 firms globally, providing an agile, scalable platform in an Investment Bank grade Cybersecurity wrapper.
Options clients include the leading global investment banks, hedge funds, funds of funds, proprietary trading firms, market makers, broker/dealers, private equity houses and exchanges. With offices in 8 key cities; New York, Toronto, Chicago, London, Belfast, Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand, Options are well placed to service their customers both on-site and remotely.
In 2019, Options secured a significant growth investment from Abry Partners, a Boston-based sector-focused private equity firm. This investment has enabled Options to considerably accelerate its growth strategy to invest further in its technology platform and expand its reach in key financial centres globally.
Options has been named among the UK's leading growth companies in the 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 and 2017 Sunday Times HSBC International Track 200 league table.
For more on Options, please visit www.options-it.com, follow us on Twitter at @Options_IT and visit our LinkedIn page.
About Abry Partners (www.abry.com)
Abry is one of the most experienced and successful sector-focused private equity investment firms in North America. Since its founding in 1989, the firm has completed over $82 billion of leveraged transactions and other private equity or preferred equity placements. Currently, the firm manages over $5.0 billion of capital across their active funds.
About ACTIV Financial (www.activfinancial.com)
ACTIV Financial Systems, Inc. ("ACTIV") is a leading global information and publishing technology provider to the financial services industry. Their real time data feeds offer access to all levels of normalized exchange pricing and related content with extreme precision and high reliability. ACTIV network spans the globe, connecting users with relevant trading information over a fully managed platform. ACTIV removes the work of connecting to and maintaining interfaces to hundreds of markets in all asset classes. Their data distribution technology is offered independently and offers a data model agnostic platform that is truly vendor neutral. For content creators seeking enterprise streaming functionality through a modern, mature, and industry integrated API, ACTIV can service the entire scope of real time market data requirements across private and public networks.
