Thomson Financial has acquired privately-held Market Systems Inc (MSI), a provider of best execution compliance technology and services to US brokerage firms, market makers and exchanges. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
MSI provides best execution compliance technology and services to measure and audit agency trading activity, thereby fulfilling the SEC regulatory requirement to provide customers with best execution.
The firm is a distributor of SEC Rule NMS execution quality data to both equity brokers and exchanges.
Thomson says the MSI technology will help its clients comply with requirements such as MiFID and Regulation NMS and will significantly enhance the value of trading over its order routing network. Additionally, MSI's transaction cost analysis technology will be integrated into the Thomson One platform.
Jim Toffey, president of Thomson Financial's institutional equities, fixed income and retail wealth management group, says: "We plan to leverage Market Systems' impressive performance alongside Thomson Financial's expertise to facilitate expansion into international markets and the addition of new asset classes, together with new functionality."
Going forward Thomson says it will expand the MSI domestic equity compliance platform to support new asset classes including fixed income and options.
Following the acquisition, MSI will be renamed Thomson Transaction Analytics and will reside within the vendor's institutional equities division.
Thomson says it will retain MSI's existing management team and Ted Karn, co-founder of MSI, will become vice president, transaction analytics and will report directly to Dan Kramer, EVP and global head of institutional equities.