UK fintech Gresham Technologies to be acquired by STG Partners for £147m
UK fintech Gresham Technologies is set to be acquired by Alliance Bidco Ltd (Bidco), a limited company indirectly owned by US-based private equity firm STG Partners, in a deal worth £146.7 million.
The two firms have agreed on a deal that comprises a cash offer and a permitted dividend that together aggregate to 163.75 pence per Gresham share. This agreed price per share equates to a premium of around 26.9% on the closing share price from Monday.
The acquisition is expected to close by the third quarter of 2024 subject to the approval of the firm’s shareholders.
Following the acquisition of Gresham, Bidco intends to merge the fintech with its other portfolio company Alveo, which it acquired in January 2023. Alveo is a cloud-based data management, analytics, and Data-as-a-Service provider for the financial services industry.
“By combining Gresham with Alveo, we will create a capital markets data management specialist that offers clients greater scale and a range of solutions to facilitate their business processes,” claims Marc Bala, MD at STG and a director of Bidco.
Moreover, Bidco believes the deal is a “compelling opportunity” to obtain a well-established firm that offers “post-trade processing solutions to capital markets participants”.
Bidco adds that its new purchase is strongly placed as a “data control, reconciliation, and post-trade workflow vendor to the financial services sector across the EMEA, North America, and APAC regions”.
Formed in 1969, Gresham is a software company that supplies automation and data reconciliation solutions for financial services firms. Gresham’s flagship offering is its Clareti software platform, which provides data governance, regulatory compliance, and risk management services.
Commenting on the acquisition, Gresham chairman Richard Last says the deal enables the firm “to continue the Clareti journey started over a decade ago” and “provides a good opportunity for Gresham shareholders to realise fair and certain value”.