The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) worried that ION’s purchase of Broadway Technology raises competition concerns in the supply of electronic trading systems.
Both companies provide specialist trading systems to financial organisations, such as banks, that allows the trading of foreign exchange and fixed income (FI) securities such as government bonds.
With that in mind, the CMA is worried that the supply of FI electronic trading systems, given ION can be considered the largest supplier of these systems and Broadway is one of only two significant competitors.
“We’ve examined a wide range of evidence during this investigation, and numerous customers have raised serious concerns,” said Joel Bamford, senior director at the CMA. “We consider ION to already be the largest provider of these products and they’re buying one of their closest competitors. We are therefore concerned that this merger could damage competition in a market which is critical to trading activities in the UK, leaving the merging companies’ customers with a worse deal.”
ION must now address the CMA’s concerns within 5 working days. If they are unable to do so, the deal will be referred for an in-depth Phase 2 investigation.
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