LONDON, Feb. 4, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — ClearMacro Ltd, (“CM”), the UK-based independent investment analytics provider, today announced the completion of an investment by affiliates of British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (“BCI”), one of Canada’s largest asset managers with C$153.4 billion of managed assets as at March 31, 2019.

The management and staff of CM maintain a majority shareholding in the company and CEO Mike Simcock and the executive management team remain unchanged. A representative from BCI has now joined the CM board. CM has continued to expand its capabilities through 2019 with a growing talent base, range of content partnerships and institutional clients. This expansion is set to gather pace following completion.

Mike Simcock (CEO, ClearMacro) commented: “With CM’s long-term future as an industrial-grade investment analytics provider secured, CM is poised to establish leadership in the burgeoning market for data analytics in the investment industry. With the capital strength of BCI behind us, we will materially complement our team, geographical presence and grow our access to additional partners and channels.

“CM’s mission is to level the playing field in data analytics for professional investors by providing institutional investors access to the powerful methodologies and tools employed in systematic quant investing. Investment firms need a short cut to developing future-proofed data strategies, especially given the rapidly changing underlying macro environment, the shifting relevance of various datasets, as well as the accelerating developments in technology. We do the heavy lifting of data selection and processing, helping to turn data overload into an opportunity, and enabling investors to radically reweight their time back to investment decision-making.

“This investment from BCI is an endorsement of the value of industrialising information and decision-making processes at a time when the broader industry is struggling with fee compression (arising from growth in passives and low rates) but explosive informational opportunities.

“We feel truly privileged to be working with a world-class, cross-departmental team at BCI who are forward-looking and fully understand the opportunity to employ cutting edge techniques to better mitigate investment risks and improve return profiles. Our strategic partnership with BCI will put CM in a leading position to provide distinctly open platforms which enable customers to build their own signals and strategies and to choose what information they want to integrate to power their own decision-making.”

Mihail Garchev (Vice President, Total Fund Management, BCI) commented: “BCI has in recent years firmly established our in-house investing capabilities across asset classes. However, we also constantly benchmark ourselves and seek to improve. To that end, we have decided to materially drive forward our abilities to import best-in-class data strategies and tools to support investment decision-making and risk management processes.

“After extensive research, we are excited to become a strategic investor in ClearMacro and look forward to supporting the company in addressing the significant opportunity in the marketplace.”

Dentons (UK) acted as legal advisor to ClearMacro and Latham & Watkins LLP acted as legal advisor to BCI.

For more information about CM please visit https://www.clearmacro.com/

For more information about BCI, please visit www.bci.ca