ION Group has acquired Financial Software Systems, a US provider of treasury management, capital market and wealth management technology. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded in 1992, Financial Software Systems serves banks, broker-dealers, corporates and fund managers around the world. The company is headquartered in Horsham, Pennsylvania, and has offices in London, San Francisco, Mexico City, Singapore, Hong Kong and Hyderabad.

The firm's founders, Gerald Thurston and Vincent Small, will stay on to help integrate Financial Software Systems with the ION Group, says a statement.

Spectrum Treasury for corporates
Spectrum Treasury provides a complete solution for managing foreign exchange, fixed income, equity, and derivative contracts. Upon trade execution, positions are instantly updated in Spectrum to provide real-time data to all traders across a network. The turn-key Spectrum solution provides a highly functional web-portal which can be easily integrated into any technical environment.

Spectrum provides a high-performance solution to facilitate substantial daily trading volumes and open positions, including:

• complete and fully integrated front, middle and back-office functionality
• comprehensive financial instrument coverage
• flexible integration with dealing systems (Bloomberg, EBS Reuters)
• real-time position, P L, cashflow, risk management and hedging blotters
• straight-through-processing with user-defined workflows
• integrated Back-Office providing confirmations, payments and sub-ledger accounting
• support for SWIFT and CLS
• real-time limit monitoring for counterparties, traders, countries and currencies.

Managing the overlap
ION are becoming a powerhouse in corporate treasury management systems. The overlap of functionality, systems, support teams and sales offices grows with each takeover: City Financials, IT2 Solutions and now Financial Software Systems. ION will need to handle these precious assets - systems, customers and user groups - with care otherwise they will just melt away. Already Aite analyst Enrico Camerinelli has flagged up several concerns about ION's conservative corporate culture and its effects on acquired firms.