Iress expansion continues
Iress has continued its acquisition-led growth with the $8.4 million purchase of South African financial planning software provider Spotlight Interactive.
Spotlight is an established supplier within South Africa, with broad distribution servicing the institutional and independent financial adviser market segments.
Its software supports a number of sophisticated life insurance products in the region, and the firm is keen to leverage from Iress technological capabilities and work towards the goal of straight-through processing.
The acquisition will add over $1 million to Iress’ earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation within the first year, with Spotlight’s recent win of a major South African client expected to boost this to almost $2 million at the end of the second year.
Andrew Walsh, Iress Wealth Management Solutions general manager, said Spotlight’s strong domestic brand and presence will remain intact, continuing as a self-sufficient entity independent of Iress’ other operations.
“We believe strongly in local expertise that leverages from our global experience and technology offerings.
“Spotlight will continue to operate as a South African-focused domestic business, with client support and development provided locally, drawing upon the expanded technology products where beneficial,” he said.
He also expects there will be “lots of cross pollination of ideas across the regions”, and said Iress intends to take advantage of the time-zone differences to gain greater efficiencies, particularly in rolling out software updates and other maintenance.
“Over time, there will be more and more opportunity to manage development that way too,” Walsh said, but emphasised that it is not planning to move any high-touch aspects of the business such as client services to South Africa.
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