The Headhunter

Reuters Claims it is Catching up with Bloomberg

Reuters claims to be catching up with Bloomberg for the first time in a decade as it beat City expectations with an increased market share for 2005. Reuters has been driving its recovery with Glocer's CorePlus strategy to give clients more exclusive data and transaction capabilities and becoming part of the technical infrastructure at banks, brokerages and fund managers. Click here to read more. The FT reports that Reuters' acquisition of Telerate has enabled them to increase market share and that additionally they had succeeded in winning increased business from existing customers.

ICAP buys EBS

ICAP plc announced on Friday it has agreed to buy foreign exchange and commodities trading platform EBS Group Ltd. for upto USD775mn. ICAP said it will merge its BrokerTec bond trading system with EBS to create an electronic trading network that will generate more than USD400mn in annual revenue and a third of ICAP's profits. Click here to read more.

Pre-Sales Project Manager - Fund Data - London

Our client provides off-the-shelf and customised web solutions for fund data. We seek a Project Manager to liaise between our client's sales and support teams and their clients (fund managers, asset managers, hedge funds). You will have worked with fund data and data feeds/factsheets and will have very strong project skills. You will manage functional specifications, plan and communicate pricing, manage timescales and implement clear communication guidelines with outsourced developers, internal business groups and clients.

For more information please contact Aine Hall.

Product Support Specialist - Reference Data

Our client is a global data vendor with plans to grow revenues in their reference data business. They are creating a new role for a product support specialist who has a strong grasp of securities' identifiers. This role is multi-faceted and combines content development, external/internal training, product checking and data integration issues. Key to this role are excellent client facing skills as well as a sound understanding of why securities' identifiers are used and how they are managed. Our client offers excellent career opportunities. For more information contact Aine Hall.

Mergermarket Confirms Sale Plans

New Media Spark, the technology VC firm is pressing ahead with the sale of Mergermarket, the M&A online news service. They hope to raise more than USD200mn from the sale of the business. A web article states Apax and 3i are expected to lead the European private equity interest and Veronis Suhler Stephenson are said to be main US private equity interest. Thomson, Euromoney and Bureau Van Dijk are understood to be the vendor main candidates. Reuters and Dow Jones have also been mentioned.

Electronic Trading to Drive Market Transformation

A joint study by IBM and The Economist Intelligence Unit has said that expanded electronic trading will be the main driver of change in the European Financial markets over the next ten years. In Europe, over 80% of buy-side and sell-side firms cited "expanded electronification of instruments" as the main driver of change over the next ten years until 2015. Click here to read the report in full.

Market Returns

Inside Market Data (April 10th Edition) reports the data and information market grew in 2005 but finds it hard to give specifics. They say direct comparisons with previous years are difficult as their report now contains the entire data and information market, not just the real-time market. They reckon the overall data market totals USD11.1bn with all the major players seeing revenue growth last year. They cite FactSet as the leader with 24% growth. Bloomberg and Thomson both had 9% growth and Reuters had 4% growth. IMD goes on to say that if ratings agencies are included, then both S&P and Moody's had larger slices of the market than Thomson.