More toes to tread on
Jinfo Blog

26th October 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Thomson Reuters’ relentless march up the acquisition trail continues apace. As well as a little crop of business news and comment acquisitions, they’ve now bought a tax management package from the professional services firm Deloitte LLP. Hugin (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e24988) and Breakingviews (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e26055 or http://www.vivavip.com/go/e25656) are among their more recent targets – the latter ‘treading on the toes’, as Penny Crossland puts it, of services like the FT’s Lex or WSJ’s Heard It On The Street. But their further purchase of the Abacus Enterprise suite of products from professional services firm Deloitte LLP (http://digbig.com/5bamkc) treads on a completely different set. There could also be some interesting parallels here with the investment in RocketLawyer, reportedly made earlier this year by Thomson Reuters’ arch rival LexisNexis (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e15291). Abacus products help corporations and their advisors plan, comply and remit income taxes and value added taxes; while LexisNexis’s RocketLawyer provides both legal forms and the online tools to enable laypeople to complete them successfully. The source of the RocketLawyer story also referred to other earlier back office software supplier purchases by LexisNexis. And the common factor in all of this is the steady move by information providers into supplying commoditised versions of the business processes to which their information is applied. It’s also borne out by Outsell’s recently published Legal, Tax & Regulatory: 2009 Market Forecast and Trends Report (purchase details at http://digbig.com/5bamsb). Its author David Curle predicts that the sector will be increasingly in competition with entities such as software providers – particularly in practice management, compliance, and other workflow-intensive parts of the segment. When times are tough even for this normally resilient sector, Thomson Tax & Accounting shows segment-beating growth, partly through acquisitions that include not only Abacus but also the governance, risk, and compliance software specialist Paisley, Outsell’s Curle reports. So too does Wolters Kluwer Tax, Accounting & Legal, he adds, with its recent purchase of governance, risk, and compliance software specialist Axentis. When more and more of the stages – from data and information gathering right through to business processes based on them – are automated, the risk of the warm bodied information specialist being frozen out increases. Developments like these require careful watching.

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