The Carlyle Group, a US-based private equity and asset management firm, has acquired ITRS Group, a UK provider of real-time monitoring systems to brokers and other financial markets clients.
London-based ITRS is a technology provider focused on supplying trading infrastructure-monitoring software. The company has 600 installations worldwide and earned revenue of £16 million in the year ended March 2011. The firm also has offices in New York, Hong Kong and Manila.
ITRS Group offers real-time monitoring and management with specialist interfaces for over 100 third-party trading and risk applications, including core trading applications, services and execution venues. ITRS's core product is Geneos, which is designed to use real-time proactive and predictive monitoring and management to provide financial institutions with an ultra-high speed overview of their trading environment. It is also designed to enable clients to quantify the performance and robustness of an institution's trading infrastructure at local, regional and global levels.
Equity for the investment will come from Carlyle Europe Technology Partners II, a €539 million fund that closed in November 2008. Since 2002, Carlyle's European technology team has invested in 22 companies, including risk and regulatory compliance software vendor FRS Global and Trema, a provider of treasury and asset management software for corporations and financial institutions.
“As financial firms are increasingly challenged by the growing cost and complexity of running high-performance trading infrastructures, and facing the increased regulatory pressure to manage the operational risk of potential systems outages, ITRS is emerging as a best-of-breed solution provider for real-time application and infrastructure monitoring,” said Fernando Chueca, director in Carlyle's European Technology Partners team.
Kevin Covington, managing director, ITRS Europe, added his firm had been searching for investment as a means to grow its business for three years. “We were looking for someone who would buy in to the ethos of our company and help take us forward,” he said. “We want to continue to expand our business in North America and Asia-Pacific, especially Singapore and Manila. We chose carefully – The Carlyle Group are the ideal partners to help us achieve our aims.”
Due diligence was provided for the acquisition by financial research consultancy TABB Group. The Carlyle Group had approximately US$153 billion of assets under management as of 30 June 2011. The company invests across corporate private equity, real assets, global market strategies and fund of funds solutions in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, North and South America.