Market data platform provider SOLVE Advisors acquires fintech Lumesis

SOLVE Advisors, Inc., a provider of fixed income market data platforms, has acquired fintech company Lumesis.

Lumesis’ product operation and team will be integrated into SOLVE’s existing organisation. Upon integration, the Lumesis DIVER product suite will provide additional workflow for municipal asset class, analyzes related to price transparency and regulatory solutions to SOLVE’s market data platform.

Lumesis, founded in 2010, has always been looking to expand its presence in the fixed income market, said CEO Gregg Bienstock.

“We got to know each other and it made a lot of sense to us,” he said of SOLVE, describing the two companies as a “complementary fit.”

Before the merger, SOLVE co-founder Eugene Grinberg said he had spoken with Bienstock and Lumesis President and Chief Operating Officer Tim Stevens about working together as channel partners. But in the past year, Grinberg said SOLVE, which acquired Advantage Data and Best Credit Data earlier this year, became more interested in combining with firms that have “interesting” products, a strong team and can increase its in-house expertise.

“Obviously, Tim and Gregg have built a great business there. They are viewed as experts and thought leaders in the muni market,” he said. “This acquisition made a lot of sense.” The price tag for the acquisition was not made public.

SOLVE was launched in 2011 with the goal of improving price transparency across fixed-income markets, primarily by collecting pre-trade price data, such as bids and offers, across half a million different securities, including munis, according to Grinberg.

“Fundamentally, many fixed income markets are still very much voice and over the counter, and prices are often communicated via email or chat,” he said. “So we work with the buy and sell side to understand the chatter and organize price data and create workflow analytics, which ultimately saves people time.”

Grinbeg noted Lumesis’ price product, in particular, and some of its upgrades have an “interesting overlap” with what SOLVE has built.

Lumesis has expanded its data services in the municipal market over the years, leveraging technology to create more efficiency with the digital platform, which also gives users the ability to refine parameters and comparable securities to reflect their own professional judgment. The company introduced a debt analysis tool that was integrated into the pricing platform to provide customers with more configurable information in the market in mid-September.

“There’s a lot of opportunity to integrate everyone’s products and create a more unified offering across fixed income markets serving the primary and secondary side of the business,” Grinberg said.

SOLVE’s database gives Lumesis access to data the company does not have, while Lumesis’ data and technology can be beneficial to SOLVE, Bienstock said.

“It’s essentially the integration of the databases and the integration of the technology, which will allow us to serve a broader interest rate market, rather than just the municipal market,” he added.

Traditionally, SOLVE is more of a data company, while Lumesis’ products focus on creating workflows to serve “different use cases, different personas [and] analytics that help make sense of the data,” Grinberg said.

The first focus, he said, is “how can we leverage each other’s offerings to make the existing products better, how can we do some quick integrations?”

For example, having the SOLVE price transparency data in the DIVER product suite will expand the ability to pull in comparable prices to compile representative scales, the firms said.

“This is more about deeper integration between the products,” Grinberg said. “It’s a similar look and feel, and it’s starting to look like a single unified product that serves all sides of the business.”

The agreement was concluded last week, and the database integration will take time. However, Bienstock noted that the priority “is to leverage each other’s expertise, both technical and otherwise, to bring more to market faster.”