Carousel Capital Buys Financial Data Provider Mergent

Private investment firm Carousel Capital last week acquired Mergent, Inc., a provider of business and finance information on global publicly listed and private companies. Mergent serves a global customer base of reference libraries, business informatics providers and investment professionals. Carousel Capital acquired Mergent from Xinhua Finance Limited, a financial information and media service provider in China. Carousel Capital partnered with the current management team of Mergent to make the purchase.

Mergent's history in publishing dates back to 1900, when it was the original publisher of Moody's securities manuals. Mergent's database includes descriptive and fundamental information on domestic and international companies; pricing and terms and conditions data on fixed income and equity securities; and corporate event data. Customers can receive the data through customized data feeds, online user interfaces and printed publications.

Mergent also develops and licenses equity and fixed income investment products based on proprietary investment methodologies. The company's index calculation platform is used by large index companies. Mergent's index calculation and pricing distribution protocols are used to administer index rules and distribute real-time pricing data.

Mergent certainly has an impressive stable of offerings and that portfolio should continue to grow with this new support from Carousel Capital. Carousel has experience in this arena, and will likely bring enough resources to the table to help Mergent further develop its niche information to a customer base that demands it. Even in tough economic times, the need for financial information is steady. So look for Mergent to experience growth from this acquisition in the short term.

CN.Net Ltd. Launches New Banking Directory

Payments reference data provider CB.Net Ltd. has launched a new service, The European Banking Directory, in partnership with the European Payments Council (EPC). The new directory will include listings of all licensed banks in the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA).

The directory will also provide users trade, retail and brand names, registered address and the SEPA status of banks. It will be accessible at www.europeanbankingdirectory.com. CB.Net will power the directory and it will cover the 31 countries in SEPA. The data included in the directory is checked and verified by CB.Net before it is updated each week.

CB.Net will integrate the European Banking Directory into its flagship product, BankSearchPlus, to provide a comprehensive payments reference in just one source.

By integrating the new directory into its trademark offering, CB.Net is certainly raising its profile in this space and positioning the company as a one-stop-shop for such data. This should be a huge selling point for both current and prospective customers. In addition, the launch will help CB.Net make an even larger impression on the banking industry as a whole. By introducing a product around SEPA, CB.Net is doing its share to bring more attention to this area in the marketplace.

Locating Opportunities

The release of the new Apple iPhone 3G has turned up the volume of the discussion about geo-location opportunities quite a bit.

Geo-location, for those not already familiar with it, is the same technology that powers GPS systems in cars, only now it's beginning to proliferate on cell phones. Download a free software application, and you can access GPS satellites to always know where you are. The flipside of that equation, and the place where all the excitement lies, is that others can know where you are as well.

This nascent industry is just beginning to grapple with the huge privacy issues that come along with this technology, but for the moment, it's a fascinating playground for all sorts of software and information companies. While numerous software companies are rushing out the expected social networking applications so that users can, for example, find out what bars their friends are at (who would ever have thought "GPS" might one day come to mean "Group Partying Software"?), information applications to date are much more sophisticated and interesting.

There are of course dozen of pundits breathlessly talking about all the advertising opportunities that will emerge from geo-location, almost always involving companies selling this new form of high tech advertising to local retailers. Of course, these are the same local retailers that yellow pages publishers are still trying to convince to establish a minimal web presence in 2008.

In the mean time, some of the data applications of geo-location look a lot more promising. Consider a New York City start-up called Sense Networks. It gives cell phone users a free software application called CitySense that gives users all sorts of social networking functionality. But on the back-end, it aggregates all the positional data it collects for highly sophisticated B2B applications such as store site location planning, retail competitive intelligence, even trend data on what stores and restaurants are doing well that hedge funds are attempting to use for an investment edge. Another company called Path Intelligence is doing something similar in the U.K. Microsoft has recently launched a service called Clearflow that uses similar technology to report traffic congestion in real-time and offer the best alternate routes. Inrix, a Microsoft spin-off, also offers traffic data, based in part on geo-location technology.

The data opportunities in geo-location look to be huge, with particular advantage for those who jump in sooner rather than later, because it's rapidly becoming clear that historical data for comparative purposes is going to be very valuable in this business. Ever better, data applications in geo-location tend to focus on aggregate data, meaning no need to wrestle with complex privacy issues.

Labels: clearflow, geolocation, inrix, Microsoft, path intelligence, sense networks

Manufacturers' News Buys IndustryNet

Manufacturers' News announced this week it has acquired IndustryNet.com and will merge it into its established industrial search engine, mniguide.com to build a more complete guide for individuals seeking manufacturers and suppliers.

IndustryNet has made a name for itself in the search engine space by only listing industrial companies. The listings are organized into one or more of IndustryNet's 10,000 product/service categories so buyers can easily identify the most relevant vendors. IndustryNet also has a request for quote feature that enables buyers to easily seek competitive bids from a variety of suppliers.

MNI compiles information about U.S. manufacturing companies and industrial businesses. Its search engine (mniguide.com) contains listing for nearly 600,000 companies. In addition, the company says that mniguide.com handles more than 20,000 unique searches each day. Users can send emails to or click through to the web sites of the 25,000 companies that have preferred listings in the directory. Users can also send requests for quotes to companies of interest to them.

Visitors to the mniguide.com site (www.mniguide.com) will be redirected to the IndustryNet domain.

This is certainly a smart move by Manufacturers' News. While their current search offering was robust enough to provide relevant results for users, the inclusion of IndustryNet data and functionality will only serve to make those search results even more powerful. If users can't find what they're looking for on your site, they won't hesitate to move on to a competitor. The combination of Manufacturers' News and IndustryNet should undoubtedly provide customers with exactly what they are looking for--and enable them to find it as quickly as possible. This definitely solidifies Manufacturers' News' standing in the industry and illustrates how committed the company is to providing a solid web offering.

New Service Makes CUSIP Content More Accessible, Manageable

CUSIP Global Services has launched the CUSIP Access premium-level service for its financial services clients. The new service features enhancements that will help clients more easily find and manage data they need and integrate it into their own data management systems.

CUSIP Access is a web-based reference data verification tool that can access all CUSIP numbers, including corporate, municipal, government, mortgage-backed and private placement issuers.

Among the new functionality that CUSIP boasts is a portfolio download that allows subscribing clients to download CUSIP data for up to 25 CUSIP numbers of ISINs from an external source. CUSIP NOW has scrolling real-time alerts of new CUSIP issuances for real-time clients and issue-level searches enable subscribers to search by issue description or update date values.

CUSIP is offering other subscription services through its CUSIP Access premium-level service. One is Associated Obligor, which helps users identify complex relationships by linking entities ultimately responsible for debt service payments in the municipal market and Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS). This enables searching for the industry groupings of an individual entity or viewing all entities within an industry group.

According to the company, future enhancements will include the availability of loan CUSIPs.

The increased functionality that CUSIP has created through its new premium-level service should be well-received by users who already value CUSIP's offerings. Perhaps the main features content users demand today are the ability to integrate that content into the workflow along with the ability to more easily search that content to yield the most relevant results. CUSIP's new service promises both. In addition, real-time alerts are gaining in popularity too, as the web is an ideal enabler for such immediate access to valuable content; and CUSIP has addressed this trend as well.

While current CUSIP customers will likely want to take advantage of this new functionality, prospective customers may be more apt to try this more complete offering too.