Alliance Bidco, a limited company indirectly owned by Symphony Technology Group (STG Partners), a $10bn US private equity firm focused on data, software and analytics, has agreed to an all-cash £146.7m take-private of Gresham Technologies, a UK fintech specialising in solutions for data integrity and control, banking integration, payments and cash management.
Under the terms of the acquisition, Gresham shareholders will be entitled to receive 163.75p per share in cash, representing a 26.9% premium to the closing share price of 129p on Monday.
According to a statement published on the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday, Alliance Bidco believes that the acquisition “represents a compelling opportunity to acquire an attractive and well-established business providing post-trade processing solutions to capital markets participants”, describing Gresham as “well-positioned” in its role as “a data control, reconciliation and post-trade workflow vendor to the financial services sector across the EMEA, North America and APAC regions”.
Alliance Bidco intends to combine Gresham with Alveo, a portfolio company and an enterprise data management software platform acquired last January “with the aim of building a global and differentiated enterprise data management and governance platform for the capital markets tech ecosystem”.
In the statement, the company highlights Clareti Control, a solution for automating, validating and reconciling transaction data, workflows and reporting, and smart bank account platform Floe within Gresham’s product suite, describing the former as “a bespoke product in the financial services reconciliation market with robust capabilities” and having “increasingly contributed a larger share of Gresham Group revenues over time”.
STG Partners’s portfolio currently comprises 29 international technology companies, which collectively employ over 13,000.
STG Partners was advised by Paul Hastings (Europe) and William Blair. Gresham was advised by Taylor Wessing and Houlihan Lokey.
