IHS Markit's acquisition of Ipreo brings together businesses with strong growth potential in alternative assets and solutions for asset managers. As a key service provider to private equity and venture capital firms, Ipreo offers broad solutions including portfolio assessment, valuations, investor reporting, operating metrics, and investment performance. The synergies between IHS Markit and Ipreo will allow for new data, real time intelligence, and improved workflow efficiency on the fixed income markets and across alternatives.

In our featured Q&A Adam Kansler, IHS Markit's president of financial services along with Ipreo's president and COO, Kevin Marcus discuss how both organizations are addressing the needs of asset managers, municipalities, private equity and venture capital firms, and public companies.

How do you describe Ipreo and its products and services?

Kevin Marcus: Ipreo's software and services facilitate efficient capital markets activity by managing communications and connectivity between all market participants. Whether it is a venture capital firm monitoring its investment portfolio, an investment bank leading a debt or equity raise for a client, municipalities issuing debt or public companies communicating with its investors, clients rely on our intelligence, data, technology solutions and network to make the markets work.

We are an important service provider to private equity and venture capital firms, their portfolio companies and their investors. We offer solutions through iLevel and Qval for portfolio assessment, valuations, investor reporting, operating metrics, and investment performance.

For banks and the buy-side, Ipreo combines new issuance systems with global financial and investor data, enabling our clients to execute deals more efficiently. Our book building platforms are the industry standard across asset classes, and our Investor Access platform brings asset managers directly into the workflow for new issues.

For corporations, we provide a suite of capital markets insight and workflow tools to understand, communicate with, and analyze interactions with their largest investors.

What were the key strategic drivers for the merger?

Adam Kansler: As a combined firm, we have a deep set of relationships across the front, middle and back office of financial institutions, a range of products into corporates, an enhanced set of tools and combined offering to the buyside and other asset managers, and leading private capital management and valuation tools. We feel very excited about what the total business can now offer to our customers.

Mergers come in all forms, but it sounds like this is one predicated on a growth and innovation strategy-is that a fair statement?

Adam: Absolutely. There is virtually no overlap between our product lines. The synergies between what Ipreo does in primary markets and what we do in secondary markets are significant. We expect to offer customers new data and workflow solutions and more real time intelligence on fixed income markets in the loan market and across alternatives as a result of bringing Ipreo into IHS Markit.

With the continued growth in the popularity of alternative assets, where do you see the product synergies emerging between your products?

Kevin: There are essentially four main areas: syndicated loans, private capital markets, debt capital markets and corporations.

Bringing together our syndicated loan businesses addresses workflow needs across the entire life cycle of a syndicated loan and serves virtually every type of participant in the global syndicated loan market. We aim to improve straight through processing between front and back office upon deal closing and over the life of a loan. It will also enable significantly enhanced automation for complex functions such as portfolio monitoring, and transactions such as loan amendments.

Our Private Capital Markets offers a unique opportunity to integrate Ipreo's industry leading capital formation platform (iLEVEL) with IHS Markit's broad valuation services across asset classes) We also envision synergies with WSO especially for direct lending

Our Debt Capital Markets sector covers corporate and municipal bonds. We have opportunities to combine Ipreo's market-leading Bookrunning and Muni Data products to IHS Markit's extensive reference, analytics, sector and liquidity data.

Our work with Corporations in the industrial sectors brings together our deep domain expertise and our extensive client base for investor relations and corporate governance solutions. Insights and data from IHS Markit such as macroeconomic forecasting, securities lending/short interest, and fixed income and derivative markets are relevant for Ipreo's customer base and we will explore how those might enhance and expand existing services in the near future.

Should customers expect to see further R&D and investment in the alternative space?

Adam: For sure. This an area that continues to grow and where we will look to have an increased presence. With our strong base, further investment will allow us to rapidly expand the quality and breadth of what we can offer our customers.

Kevin: One of the key Ipreo products is assisting in the workflow for new issues across all asset classes between the buy-side and sell-side. What should capital market participants expect in the future from the combined teams?

We launched Investor Access two years ago which focuses on automating information flow between primary market participants, closing the technology gap between secondary and primary market activity. We started in EMEA around corporate investment grade bond issuance, due to the speed and complexity of that market. Now, the majority of corporate IG issuance flows over our rails. We have also extended the solution to APAC and we are seeing quick take-up across those markets as well.

We expect to bring the same level of automation and process improvement currently seen from Investor Access across asset class and around the globe. Soon, we are launching IA for US municipal debt issuance.

Any final words?

Adam: Over the past decade we have seen increasing requirements from our buyside clients to assist in operational risk and compliance, workflow efficiency and outsourced managed services in such areas as data management and independent valuations. This trend has been magnified over the past two years due to pressure on management fees and increased regulatory burden. On the plan sponsor side, we see continued growth in loan assets along with allocations into all alternative assets classes including private equity, venture capital, real estate and infrastructure. The combination of IHS Markit and Ipreo complements this strategy and we will continue to provide differentiated services to our valued customers.

By Jim Coley, MD Account Management, North America

S&P Global provides industry-leading data, software and technology platforms and managed services to tackle some of the most difficult challenges in financial markets. We help our customers better understand complicated markets, reduce risk, operate more efficiently and comply with financial regulation.

This article was published by S&P Global Market Intelligence and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.