The Finextra50 Financial Technology Index closed last week slightly down, with falls in Reuters and Cognizant a major contributor, while many of the index's smaller cap stocks saw steady gains, particularly in Europe.
Major Gainers
It was a good week for many of the index's European constituents. The Innovation Group closed last week up 11% to 36.5p after reporting a 17% jump in first-half pretax profit. This beat its own expectations, mainly due to a boom in its core business for outsourcing services to insurance firms.
Innovation, which processes 3 million claims annually for 170 customers worldwide, reports the profit came on a 26 percent rise in revenues to 48.4 million pounds ($95.4 million) in the six months to March 31.
AIM-listed UK portfolio analytics vendor Statpro rose 7.2% to 90.5p, as CEO Justin Wheatley bought 55,000 more shares in the company. This transaction lifted his stake to 12.4%, and comes a week after the company reported that the first four months of 2007 are in line with expectations and ahead of last year.
Other major gainers were Ingenico, up 8.6% to EUR21.6, and Choicepoint, up 5.9% to $43.08. It was also a good week for technology firms serving the asset management industry, with DST, Advent and Linedata all posting gains of between 4% and 5%.
Meanwhile, news of Fiserv selling its investment support services division failed to have much impact on its stock price last week, as it closed up just .43% on the previous week.
Major Losers
Cognizant ended down 4.1% to $75.71, continuing its downward trend for May, which has been in evidence since it warned of a slowdown in revenue growth in early May and revealed plans to trim hiring in its Indian centres. The stock has fallen 10.8% since our index was created, but maintains an outperform or buy rating with many analysts, including those at Credit Suisse and Robert W. Baird.
GL Trade closed down 4.7% to EUR38.01 in a week in which it announced a strategic partnership with banking system vendor AVALOQ to provide its customers with a FIX interface to GL Trade's order management system.
Reuters closed the week down 2.4% at 623.25p, as it levelled out after hitting a 5-year high of 639p the previous Friday. The current level, a discount of 9.8% on Thomson's offer of 692 per share, reflects uncertainty about when the deal will close and whether antitrust regulators in Brussels and Washington will clear the deal.