BOSTON and GREENWICH, Conn., April
23, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Covestor, an online investing
marketplace, and Interactive Brokers Group, Inc. (NASDAQ GS: IBKR),
the largest US electronic broker by daily average revenue trades,
announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under
which Interactive Brokers will acquire Covestor.
Covestor is a pioneer in the online investing business and the
first digital asset management company to offer both active and
passive investment options. Interactive Brokers is a major
automated global electronic broker offering trading on over 100
electronic exchanges and trading venues around the world. The
acquisition solidifies and expands Interactive Brokers' position as
the leading platform for electronic trading and investing.
"Covestor brought the convenience, transparency and cost
comparison capabilities that online marketplaces provide to the
financial services sector," said Covestor CEO Asheesh Advani. "We developed our marketplace so
that people could easily search for, compare and select investment
strategies from multiple money managers. We are now joining
Interactive Brokers' marketplace to bring more products to more
people around the globe."
"This acquisition increases our ability to rapidly add more
portfolio managers to Covestor's marketplace, provide additional
asset classes to clients, and expand our offerings globally," added
Steven Holstein, Covestor's Chief
Marketing Officer.
Interactive Brokers' Chairman and CEO Thomas Peterffy praised the deal. "We are
creating a marketplace that brings investors, wealth managers and
money managers together. The acquisition of Covestor is a positive
development toward making Interactive Brokers the premier global
platform for investors, advisors, hedge funds and money managers to
find each other." Milan Galik,
President of Interactive Brokers, also added, "this development
will enable us to further refine our platform to provide a more
complete service to robo-advisor companies in general."
The transaction has been approved by both parties' respective
boards and is expected to close in the second quarter of 2015.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
About Covestor
Covestor is widely regarded as a pioneer in bringing separately
managed accounts (SMAs) online in a transparent marketplace. On
Covestor.com, investors can compare and select from a diverse
marketplace of money management talent. Covestor's Portfolio Sync
technology automatically replicates trades and provides customers
with simple and convenient trade replication functionality and the
protection of Covestor's proprietary trade filtering.
The company, which has offices in Boston and London, was backed by leading venture capital
companies, including Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, Amadeus
Capital and Bay Partners.
Covestor Limited ("Covestor") is an SEC registered investment
adviser. Information pertaining to the registration status of
Covestor can be found at www.adviserinfo.sec.gov, or may be
received from Covestor upon request.
About Interactive Brokers Group, Inc.
Interactive Brokers Group, Inc., together with its subsidiaries,
is an automated global electronic broker that specializes in
catering to financial professionals by offering state-of-the-art
trading technology, superior execution capabilities, worldwide
electronic access, and sophisticated risk management tools at
exceptionally low costs. The brokerage trading platform utilizes
the same innovative technology as the Company's market making
business, which specializes in routing orders and executing and
processing trades in securities, futures, foreign exchange
instruments, bonds and funds on more than 100 electronic exchanges
and trading venues around the world.
As a market maker, Interactive Brokers provides liquidity at
these marketplaces and, as a broker, it provides professional
traders and investors with electronic access to stocks, options,
futures, forex, bonds and mutual funds from a single IB Universal
AccountSM. Employing proprietary software on a global
communications network, Interactive Brokers is continuously
integrating its software with a growing number of exchanges and
trading venues into one automatically functioning, computerized
platform that requires minimal human intervention.
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SOURCE Covestor