Burns e Commerce Solutions and SFCorp Limited, today formally announced their agreement to market and deliver their combined supply chain finance solution for global corporates. This unique partnership brings together two innovative companies in the growth arena of supply chain finance, providing expertise in key aspects of this wide ranging topic.
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In their May 2007 'Market Overview', International Banking Systems asked: "Can banks get their act together to offer new services that are aligned to the need of corporates, large and small, or will specialists emerge to fill the gap?
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Investmaster Group Limited, owned by Canadian investment management company AGF Management Limited, has been acquired by Burns e-Commerce Solutions Ltd. The acquisition comes at a time when the wealth management market is experiencing a continued period of buoyancy and growth. Burns sees great potential for Investmaster and a synergy to utilise its own products and services to provide a broader wealth service proposition, and deliver significant growth to the business.
The new owner-management team all hold significant track records in the financial IT industry. Peter Little, Chief Executive of Burns and previously a founder of Braid, takes the Chief Executive position at Investmaster; John Dallas, joint founder of consultancy firm CSTIM and Non-Executive Partner of Morse, joins the company as Chairman.
Burns' Business Exchange Service manages £25 billion of transactions on behalf of a number of multi-national corporations and their European and Global supply chains. The deal will see Burns further enhancing Investmaster's InVantage product set with the introduction of its process automation technologies and software as a service (SaaS) delivery techniques. The intention is to broaden Investmaster's proposition with this technology.
At the same time regulation continues to drive significant change across the industry with MiFID coming into force in November. Burns technologies have been developed and adapted for the regulatory environment, and support Investmaster's compliance functionality for data exchange and integrity.
Peter Little comments, "We see this as a significant opportunity to grow a business operating in a burgeoning market space, that has an exemplary track record, high quality wealth management products and highly experienced employees."
"The synergy between the two companies is technology based. Both organisations support and assist companies operating in environments that are manually intensive, paper-based and heavily regulated. We see great opportunity to combine the expertise and technology in these areas to bring new innovation to the wealth management market."
Blake C. Goldring Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at AGF Management Ltd comments, "We have a continuing interest in Investmaster's future success, not only as a consequence of this transaction, but also through our shareholding in Smith & Williamson who will continue to be an important user of Investmaster's products. Our experience with Peter Little and his team give us great confidence that under their management the company will continue to flourish and reap the rewards of recent investments in the InVantage product set and also accelerate the company's growth through the introduction of the Burns technology."
Burns launches its new corporate website designed to focus on the value added aspects of its Business-to-Business document exchange offering.
Hewlett-Packard is looking to extend its payments hub initiative to facilitate reverse factoring. The solution, which uses Twist standards and is based on the Business eXchange platform from UK-based supplier, Burns, is used by HP's treasury operation with one of its major partners, Office Depot. The reverse factoring capability is not yet live but will be demonstrated at SIBOS and is likely to be adopted by Office Depot.
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The Hub Alliance, a grouping of four business exchange providers, is another supply chain entity that is attracting the attention of banks. The current players are Burns, Asite, Causeway and Certipost.
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The Hub Alliance, the organisation that inter connects electronic data hubs, is pleased to announce that it will interoperate on the basis of TWIST standards and will accept messages from clients based on TWIST standards. Both the Hub Alliance and TWIST aim to close the gaps for automation in the physical and financial supply chain and to release the enormous value locked up in disjointed paper-based processes.
Buyers and suppliers are now benefiting from process efficiencies and enhanced visibility made possible through the adoption of electronic exchange. The traditional 'paper and post' process is clearly inappropriate as a means of moving data from one computer to another.
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