Zafin acquires FINCAD to accelerate growth and offer pricing and analytics solutions

By Edlyn Cardoza

Zafin, the world’s leading SaaS cloud-native product and pricing platform for banks and credit unions, recently announced it has acquired FINCAD, a global leader in pricing and risk analytics of financial derivatives and fixed income products. By acquiring FINCAD, Zafin expands its product portfolio and analytics capabilities to become one of Canada’s largest B2B FinTech companies with a significant global presence, including more than 450 institutional clients, over 60 ecosystem partners, and more than 500 employees spread out across 13 global offices.

FINCAD is a leader in providing derivative and fixed-income pricing, modelling, and risk analytics to many of the world’s banks, asset management firms, insurance companies and hedge funds. The addition of FINCAD’s capital markets expertise, next-generation analytics, and extensive global client base will position the combined company for extraordinary growth.

For Zafin, the acquisition is a key milestone in the company’s history. They will now offer pricing and advanced analytics solutions to institutions across all banking segments, including retail, corporate and commercial, and capital markets – a key differentiator in the marketplace. As a result of the transaction, FINCAD will operate as the Capital Markets Group of Zafin under the established FINCAD brand.

Al Karim Somji, Founder and Group CEO of Zafin, said: “As we look to further accelerate our global growth and enhance our end-to-end pricing and analytics offering to the marketplace, this move into the Capital Markets space is a key step. FINCAD naturally stood out to us given their impressive track record of being the leading provider of derivative analytics and pricing with a strong team that delivers for some of the world’s most trusted institutions. Working together as one global team, there is tremendous opportunity for us to scale our business by sharing deep subject-matter expertise and talent in key areas such as pricing, risk analytics and cloud technology. I believe with this strategic acquisition we’re truly going to disrupt the industry and set a new standard for how institutions can partner with fintechs like Zafin and FINCAD to deliver powerful product, pricing and advanced analytics solutions.”

Backed by a career in the capital markets, Christian Kahl, Head of Product Strategy and Client Service at FINCAD, will become Interim President, Capital Markets at Zafin. FINCAD Analytics leader and current Head of Product Development, Russell Goyder, will become Chief Analytics Officer of Zafin. Both Kahl and Goyder will report to Al Karim Somji, Founder and Group CEO of Zafin.

“This is an exciting opportunity to align two leading financial software providers to drive innovation and advancement across the industry,” said Christian Kahl, Interim President, Capital Markets at Zafin. “Our clients will benefit from Zafin’s expertise in cloud-native platform technologies, unparalleled user experience, as well as Zafin’s impressive ecosystem. The combined offerings of Zafin and FINCAD will enable us to deliver an unmatched portfolio of services to our clients, and further positions us as global market leaders.”

Clients seek sophisticated risk and valuation capabilities embedded in a trade decision, hedging, and risk management to remain competitive in today’s derivatives markets. The acquisition offers a key opportunity for FINCAD to leverage Zafin’s 24/7 client support and proven cloud-native platform technology to enhance its suite of patented products and further accelerate FINCAD’s ability to empower its client base to solve complex analytics problems with innovative simplicity and speed. FINCAD expects cloud computing to be a game-changer for institutions looking for advanced computations powered by leading cloud technologies.

The acquisition of FINCAD also further differentiates Zafin in the marketplace with a new Analytics-as-a-Service offering, which the company expects to launch later in the year.

“FINCAD’s patented analytics have for decades been recognized as part of the standard tool set for quantitative analysts. By coming together with Zafin and leaning on their deep expertise in unharnessing the power of cloud computing, I’m thrilled at the art of the possible as we look to further enhance our products to provide our clients with the next generation of valuations and risk analysis,” said Russell Goyder, Chief Analytics Officer of Zafin.

IBS Intelligence had reported that Zafin, a banking software enterprise platform company that provides relationship-based pricing to banks and financial institutions, had announced partnering with Codat, a technology company that enables small businesses to seamlessly share business and financial data with financial institutions (FIs).