InvestorWeb joins the corporate big league

Having tied up two acquisitions alone last week, Investorweb is on a buying and hiring spree. Its interim results are above budget and its share price has soared since listing just four months ago. Zilla Efrat reports.

Having tied up two acquisitions alone last week, Investorweb is on a buying and hiring spree. Its interim results are above budget and its share price has soared since listing just four months ago. Zilla Efrat reports.

There’s been plenty to keep executives at fast growing on-line solutions provider Investorweb on the hop lately. And, there is no rest in sight.

Not only has the Melbourne-based group just finalised the purchases of software group Vision FPS and regional adviser group Financial Foundations, it also in hir-ing mode.

On Friday, it reported an operating profit after tax of $650,000, on revenue of $3.06 million, for the six months to December 31.

Above its internal budgets, this growth has been attributed to the better-than-expected revenues in online financial and media services, AssetWare and Inves-torWeb-DIRECT.

Funds management operation Investors Mutual’s results, however, disappointed.

“Market conditions, in which more speculative and momentum driven stocks have outperformed, have not suited Investors Mutual’s ‘inherent value’ style which fa-vours stocks measurable on fundamentals,” says InvestorWeb chief executive Otto Buttula.

Despite this, Investors Mutual’s funds under management topped $300 million by end-December — a 22.5 per cent jump from the $245 million under management as at the end of June.

Last week, Investorweb also announced two purchases in line with its drive to be-come “a total solutions provider”.

One was the acquisition of Victoria-based adviser group Financial Foundations for an undisclosed amount. Financail Foundations has a successful advisory business and has developed marketing systems for accountants about to enter the financial advisory business. Buttula says these will be codified and made available online by InvestorWeb as it releases AdviserWeb to its target market of accountants, banking networks and advisers.

Investorweb is also buying (again for an undisclosed amount) Vision FPS, one of Australia's fastest growing providers of software products and services to the advi-sory market.

Vision FPS’ clients include AM Corporation, Deloitte Touche Tomatsu, IPAC, MLC, Macquarie Bank Private Banking, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Financial Plan-ning, Permanent Trustees, Perpetual Trustees, Potter Warburg Private Clients, Pri-cewaterhouseCoopers, Towers Perrin, Were Stockbroking, William M Mercer as well as a number of stand alone advisory groups.

According to Buttula, Vision FPS’s product line up will be combined with Inves-torweb’s AdviserWeb software and research range and distribution of these will be extended to large organisations committed to Internet, ASP based product.

"Importantly, given the combined package of proven software, Internet solutions and research from a listed company, the ability to become the 'one-stop-shop' solu-tion for all levels of participants within the Australian financial services industry is now within our grasp,” Buttula says.

He is tightlipped about what purchase is next, but says: “Obviously we are talking to a lot of people and a lot of people are talking to us.”

He declines to comment on rumours that InvestorWeb is about to announce a tie-up with Telstra Financial Management Systems (Syscorp) to develop on-line fi-nancial services. Both companies are investments of the pooled development fund, Citadel.

On the staff side, InvestorWeb recently lured Phil Butterworth away from Mac-quarie Bank and is, according to Buttula, “doing a whole lot of hiring” at the mo-ment, taking on fund managers, analysts, journalists and, even, a lawyer.

Buttula says the launch of Invetorweb’s New Zealand site, www.investorweb.co.nz, has been delayed until later this calendar year, so that the group can attend to “other priorities”.

Presumably these priorities include some additions to Investorweb’s flagship Inter-net site, www.investorweb.com.au.

This site has continued its strong popularity with weekly page views growing from around 400,000 in May to over 2.5 million for the last few weeks of December. This growth has continued during the last six weeks, with the site now exceeding 3 million page views per week, Buttula says.

He adds that the group has also registered www.investorweb.co.uk and is now in-vestigating a launch into the UK market.

Other future Internet forays include www.investormart.com.au, an e-commerce web site focussing on the sale of investment-related products and services, and a live pricing site, www.liveprices.com.au.

On the Investors Mutual side, the group expects a further boost to funds under management with the launch of the Sandhurst Australian Industrial Shore Fund to financial planners in March /April of this year. Sandhurst Trustees is a subsidiary of Bendigo Bank.

Investors Mutual, along with Valu-Trac, has also been selected by Australia’s third largest Friendly Society, the South Australian based LifePlan Financial Group, to manage its first series of share market products, the Smart Bond Australian and the Smart Bond Global.

InvestorWeb’s rapid strides haven’t gone unnoticed by investors who have pushed its shares up from their issue price of 20 cents to as high as $1.44 a share. They were trading at $1.24 cents last Thursday afternoon.

And, its market capitalisation of just under $300 million a week ago is well up on the $48 million it was worth at the time of its September 23 listing, making the company’s original founders paper millionaires in a short space of time.

According to Money Management’s calculations, Buttula was worth a whopping $67.7 million when he woke up on Friday morning while his colleague David Wright value was worth $7.4 million — not bad considering that the two worked in Lonsdale’s research department just over three years ago.

At the same time, fellow InvestorWeb director Anton Tagliaferro, who used to be the Australian equities heads at BNP, is valued at around $44 million while former IOOF directors Paul Collins and Darren Hunter also look good on paper with $23.5 million each. But, perhaps, they will be too busy moving on InvestorWeb’s growth plans to have any time to spend it.