Reed Elsevier has announced its biggest acquisition in three years with a €150m offer for FircoSoft, a French company whose software helps banks spot terrorists and people on sanctions watchlists. FircoSoft, which counts eight of the world’s 10 biggest banks by assets as its clients, is owned by private equity firm Keensight Capital and Paris Orléans, the parent company of the Rothschild Group.
Reed, Europe’s largest media group, plans to combine FircoSoft with Accuity, a provider of anti-money laundering services that it bought in 2011. Both businesses are in the rapidly growing banking compliance market, which has prospered as regulators tightened scrutiny of banks and imposed bigger fines.
The FircoSoft deal, worth €150m according to a person close to the company, is the largest for Reed since the acquisition of Accuity for £343m. The transaction is subject, among other things, to the completion of a consultation with the works council of FircoSoft. Hugh Jones, chief executive of Accuity, said the combination of the two companies would allow customers to meet their sanctions screening, anti-money laundering and know your customer requirements with a “level of precision and efficiency that has never been experienced before”.
The acquisition is the latest step in Reed’s strategy of making bolt-on acquisitions rather than big deals. It has spent about $300m each year on average over the past three years, buying mostly digital businesses, while disposing of its legacy print businesses such as the US magazine Variety. Detecting transactions that violate sanctions has become of great importance to global companies as regulators have tightened restrictions and levied increasingly big penalties on sanctions-busters.
Source: Financial Times
