A private equity firm has acquired Actiance and will combine it with Smarsh.
Rival providers of social media compliance for financial services, Smarsh and Actiance, will become one company via private equity firm K1 Investment Management, which has just announced that it is acquiring Actiance.
If authorities approve the combination, the new company will serve “more than 6,500 financial services firms ─ including the top 15 global banks and regional, mid-size banks and broker-dealers ─ as well as government agencies and organizations in other regulated industries,” according to officials.
The combined Actiance and Smarsh will be able to offer clients technology to capture, record, store, and analyze more than 100 content types, officials say.
A spokesperson for K1 declined to reveal to FTF News the financial terms of the Actiance acquisition. “However, the combined company will be well over $100 million in revenue. Actiance and Smarsh have each grown revenue more than 30 percent year-over-year, with a high level of profitability that allows for continued reinvestment in the business,” the spokesperson says. “In the near term, each company will continue to operate independently. Smarsh and Actiance will be focused on delivering their product and customer commitments. No layoffs are planned at this time.”
Officials add that Smarsh and Actiance will maintain operations in Oregon, California, New York, Massachusetts, Georgia, North Carolina, Canada, India, and the United Kingdom (U.K.).
“Together we will enhance our combined sales and distribution capabilities, offer our customers additional resources and services, and accelerate our product development,” says Kailash Ambwani, CEO of Actiance, in a prepared statement.
The united vendor to come will offer “comprehensive archiving solutions for compliance, e-discovery and risk management,” officials say.
The combined effort will target a financial services industry reeling from rapid change for which “legacy technologies are no longer sufficient to comply with SEC and FINRA standards, let alone MiFID II,” says Neil Malik, managing partner at K1, in a prepared statement. “This combination of capabilities from Actiance and Smarsh provides the industry with a means to get ahead — and stay ahead — of compliance trends, while introducing the latest communications technologies to increase efficiency and effectiveness in the modern enterprise.”
The combined company will offer deployment options such as the cloud, dedicated, on-premise, and hybrid options, officials say. The capture, compliance, archiving, and supervisory capabilities can be used for electronic communications such as email, social media, mobile messaging, instant messaging/collaboration, encrypted chat and voice communications.
“Near-term priorities include more investment in product capabilities, increased flexibility in deployment options, accelerated expansion in Europe and development of a joint channel partner program,” according to officials.
Based in El Segundo, Calif., K1 describes itself as a firm “focusing on high-growth enterprise software companies globally.”
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