Ion Group, an acquisitive Irish-based financial software and data group, is in talks to buy the owner of Mergermarket in a transaction that is expected to fetch just over £1 billion… The takeover would hand Dublin-headquartered Ion a wide-ranging financial news and data service that is best known for providing nuggets of information for dealmakers and credit investors. Acuris, as the business is now called, was bought by London-based BC Partners from Pearson — former owner of the Financial Times — in a £382 million deal in 2013… Dublin-headquartered Ion has quietly become one of Europe’s largest suppliers of tools and technology to financial markets. Last year it bought trading software and data provider Fidessa for £1.5 billion as well as snapping up Patsystems, FfastFill, Rolfe & Nolan and Wall Street Systems. The company was set up by Andrea Pignataro, an Italian former bond trader at Salomon Brothers in the 1990s… The deal comes after a string of acquisitions of subscription-based companies by private equity groups recently. US buyout giant Blackstone bought a controlling stake in Thomson Reuters’ financial and risk unit in 2018. Separately, private equity group General Atlantic acquired Argus media, an oil price reporting outlet in 2016.

Javier Espinoza, Philip Stafford and Arash Massoudi