FactSet, a financial digital platform and enterprise solutions provider, announced the acquisition of LiquidityBook for a gross purchase price of $246.5 million in cash.
LiquidityBook offers cloud-native trading solutions to hedge funds, asset and wealth management, outsourced trading, and sell-side middle office clients and operates a proprietary FIX network that enables streamlined connectivity to 200+ brokers and order routing to 1,600+ destinations across 80 markets globally.
In the past year, the two companies partnered to enable the turnkey integration of LiquidityBook’s flagship order management system (OMS) into the FactSet Workstation to seamlessly link adjacent steps in the front office trade workflow, from security research and portfolio construction to order creation and trade execution. This acquisition takes this successful partnership one step further to accelerate FactSet’s mission to connect the front and middle offices.
FactSet’s ability to serve clients’ integrated workflow needs across the portfolio life cycle will be enhanced by combining LiquidityBook’s modern and scalable order management, pre-trade compliance, and investment book of record (IBOR) capabilities with FactSet’s industry-leading investment research, execution management, performance, reporting, and portfolio analytics solutions.
Launched in 2005 and based in New York with approximately 70 employees worldwide, LiquidityBook offers a modular platform for the full trading life cycle, enabling multi-asset class portfolio, order, and execution management capabilities. And architected to scale on a cloud-native, multi-tenant foundation, its solutions enable clients to track intraday portfolio holdings, initiate and monitor trade orders, ensure pre-trade and regulatory compliance, manage client/broker commissions, and process post-trade reconciliations through a single code base for every use case.
This acquisition closed on February 7, 2025, and was funded by borrowings under FactSet’s existing revolving credit facility. The deal is expected to be modestly dilutive to FactSet’s fiscal 2025 GAAP and adjusted diluted EPS.
FactSet’s advisors on the transaction include Citi as financial advisor and Cravath, Swaine & Moore as legal advisor. And LiquidityBook’s advisors include IA Global Capital as financial advisor and Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle as legal advisor.
KEY QUOTES:
“This acquisition is further evidence of FactSet’s commitment to streamlining workflows across the entire portfolio life cycle to reduce our clients’ total cost of ownership. Clients want to spend their time on actionable investment decisions, not jumping between disparate research, portfolio management, and trading platforms. Deeper integration of LiquidityBook’s OMS and IBOR into the FactSet Workstation will enable a consolidated front office solution that meets the increasingly sophisticated needs of our clients.”
– Rob Robie, Executive Vice President, Head of Institutional Buy Side, FactSet
“Since inception, LiquidityBook has focused on developing a modular solution on scalable architecture purpose-built to support the most sophisticated multi-asset trading workflows with a distinct advantage over inflexible, refactored legacy systems. We look forward to continuing this mission as part of FactSet to meet the growing workflow needs of clients across the trade life cycle without compromising on functionality.”
– Kevin Samuel, CEO, LiquidityBook
“We are excited to bring two talented teams together to expand on the existing partnership in place. The value proposition of combining our complementary solutions is already client-validated and market-tested. Joining forces now to capitalize on this opportunity is the natural next step to delivering increased value and flexibility to clients.”
– Shawn Samuel, CTO, LiquidityBook
