Thomson Reuters Financial & Risk and Blackstone create Refinitiv
Thomson Reuters Financial & Risk (F&R) has partnered with private equity firm Blackstone to create a new company called Refinitiv.
As reported in January, Blackstone bought a 55% majority stake in F&R for around $17 billion.
F&R is valued at approximately $20 billion. Thomson Reuters will receive about $17 billion in gross proceeds at closing (subject to purchase price adjustments) funded by $14 billion of debt and preferred equity to be incurred by the deal and a $3 billion cash equity contribution by Blackstone. Thomson Reuters will retain a 45% interest in F&R.
In the latest development, the duo says the closing of the transaction is expected to occur in H2 2018 and until then the business will continue to be known as Thomson Reuters Financial & Risk.
According to Thomson Reuters, F&R is used by around 40,000 institutions in over 150 countries.
As a standalone company, it will continue to focus on providing data and insights, trading platforms, market data infrastructure and open technology platforms.
David Craig, president, Thomson Reuters Financial & Risk and future CEO of Refinitiv, says: “We believe that we can find better ways for our customers to prevent financial crime. And we believe that cloud technology will drive speed and agility in the analysis of data and the unearthing of new opportunities.”
F&R’s platforms, Eikon and Elektron Data Platform, will be used by Refinitiv. The platforms have over 20,000 developers using the open APIs to create an “ecosystem” of over 50,000 customer and partner applications.
F&R also has its Eikon Messenger – and its data feeds currently deliver up to 6.3 million updates per second for over 65 million instruments.
