Two large governance, risk and compliance (GRC) giants are about to unite. Their association appears to be a good fit.

ACA Compliance Group, an IT firm that concentrates on regulatory compliance, financial crime and cybersecurity, is to acquire Cordium, a provider of governance, risk and compliance services. The transaction is expected to happen this summer, subject to regulatory approval. Its financial terms are a secret.

The deal will hopefully offer the firms' customers an impressive range of regulatory IT and consultancy services and serve as the springboard for further product innovation and global expansion. The acquisition also will expand ACA’s services in Europe to include Cordium’s regulatory hosting platform, Mirabella, and a post-Brexit EU office.  

Cordium was originally based in London before acquiring consultancies all over the world in a buying spree of epic proportions. It has offices in London, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Malta and Hong Kong. ACA, on the other hand, is almost totally American and has only office outside the US, in London. This publication rang the London office with a basic question about its date of opening, but the recipient of the call politely declined to say anything and insisted on re-routing the call to the US. This suggests that the London office is a minor part of the group. It further suggests that the acquisition of a globally active firm of Cordium's size is ACA's way of gaining access to the wider world (a difficult task for many American firms, with their insular habits) and indeed an ACA spokesperson eventually confirmed this.

Cordium, for its part, has often stated that it wants to do more with compliance IT. Its alliance with ACA is a good one for this purpose. Its CEO, Doug Morgan, is an all-rounder who has worked in both financial services and technology for two decades - itself a token of Cordium's desire to bridge the gap between financial consultancy and IT. His predecessor, Bill Mulligan, was an attorney who founded the New York firm of HedgeOp Compliance in January 2001, which is the predecessor to Cordium US and Cordium Software. He now acts as group president. Both men, perhaps significantly, are Americans - Morgan went to Yale and Mulligan went to Cornell - and this may be a sign of Cordium's eternal desire to do well in the United States, a desire fulfilled by the ACA takeover.

Indeed, Michel van Leeuwen, the CEO of the IMS Group, which merged with HedgeOp to form Cordium in 2012, said at the time: “Following the financial crisis of 2008, IMS made a strategic decision to increase its expertise in America. This is mainly due to the [US] Securities and Exchange Commission’s decision to increase its regulatory scope outside of the US and the need for UK managers to access the US market, creating an increased requirement amongst many of our clients for a broader service provision across Europe and the US.”