Two providers of account aggregation services to high-net-worth individuals are expected to announce their merger today.
New York-based Kinexus Corp., which oversees about 200,000 accounts with about $90 billion of assets, is to acquire GreenTrak Inc. of in New Rochelle, N.Y., which has about 7,500 client accounts with $50 billion of assets, according to the companies.
Clients of the two privately held companies include Merrill Lynch & Co., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Credit Suisse First Boston, and Wachovia Corp.
Kinexus, founded in 1994 as Witan Group, provides technology that provides wealthy clients with a consolidated view of their net worth through a variety of delivery channels. GreenTrak, an investment tracking service formed in 1993, brings experience in manually processing paper statements.
Other online aggregation services such as Yodlee Inc. target a mass market and use "screen scraping" to lift data from Web sites by using a client's password and account information. By contrast, financial institutions route account and transaction data directly to Kinexus; that does not worry banks, said David Green, GreenTrak's chief executive officer.
Mr. Green, who will become Kinexus' North America president, and Harry Totonis, its CEO, said companies such as Yodlee are not competitors. "We're really at one end of the spectrum and the screen scrapers are at the other end," Mr. Green said.
Shaw Lively, research manager for online financial services at International Data Corp., said account aggregation for affluent clients is a promising business. "It's going to be one that's hot and in demand." The combination of Kinexus and GreenTrak makes for "one of the strongest market participants out there," he said.
