The Finextra50 Financial Technology Index continues its fortnightly yo-yo pattern, ending last week down 2.6% to close at 99.76, mainly driven by falls in European markets and several key US constituents. iFlex and Mphasis in India benefited from currency movements and takeover speculation, and in the US eFunds also rose on news that a hedge fund has taken a 6.8% stake in the company. Total System Services, Online Resources, Ingenico, Wincor Nixdorf and Temenos all saw their shares fall.
Major gainers
Indian technology companies had a good week, buoyed by a rising market there and expectations that the rupee would cease its gains against the dollar. In fact the currency fell 1.38% against the dollar on the previous week. i-Flex rose 5.9% to Rs2,367.4, with increased speculation that Oracle would seek to increase its stake in the company. Also during the week, it announced that it is adding real-time fraud detection and multiple forms of authentication security to its FLEXCUBE retail banking product through a partnership with privately held authentication vendor Bharosa.
Mphasis, the IT and BPO services company majority owned by EDS, also rose 4.2% on the National Stock Exchange to Rs324.95.
eFunds was the only major winner last week in the US markets, closing the week up 5.34% to $35.97 driven by Wednesday’s news that New York-based hedge fund Scoggin Capital Management has taken a 6.8 percent stake in the company. Last month, after reporting a fall in earnings, eFunds said it had been approached by third parties interested in exploring strategic alternatives, including potential mergers or acquisitions.
Finextra views this transaction as a strategic investment and so it affects the free-float market capitalisation of eFunds in our index. An index divisor adjustment for this will be made before next week’s report.
Major losers
Total System Services shares lost 7.2% of their value last week as they ended the week at $30.97, reversing the steady gains the company has seen since the start of our index in early May amid higher volumes and profit-taking. It hit a 52-week high of $35.05 at one point in May, as the stock was featured as a hot pick on seekingalpha.com and on the US TV programme Mad Money, with Jim Cramer claiming it was a likely candidate for private equity buy-out. Online Resources also fell last week, closing down 7.18% to $11.42
In Europe the FTSE Euro 100 Index ended the week down 4.15% and the FTSE 100 index of UK stocks slid 2.6% after the European Central Bank raised its benchmark interest rate by a quarter-point to 4%, the highest since August 2001. Shares in financial services firms were particularly hard hit, with UBS and Deutsche Bank dropping around 6%. Falls in many of the Finextra50’s European fintech constituents mirrored this decline. Payments solution vendor Ingenico fell 6.81% to EUR 20.41 and ATM manufacturer Wincor Nixdorf dropped 6.32% to EUR69.1.
Temenos also ended the week down 6.31% to CHF26.95 despite announcing during the week that Swiss private banking group Schroders had successfully completed an IT centralisation project by migrating from the vendor’s Globus solution to T24.
Simcorp, FJH, Statpro and Patsystems all also mirrored the drop in the European markets, falling between 6% and 7.5%.