Xeye to augment Odyssey's outsourced offering and increase its U.S. presence. Luxembourg-based wealth-management platform provider Odyssey has acquired Mississauga, Canada-based advisor-desktop software maker Xeye. The deal stands to help Odyssey -- which claims to be Europe's premier wealth-management automator -- make headway in the U.S.

New continents, new channels

"Xeye has built a full Java Oracle [Service Oriented Architecture] platform for the front-end wealth-management market, which is especially strong in North America within the [customer-relationship management (CRM) and] retail brokerage area," says Odyssey's CEO Antoine Duchateau. "This complements our strengths in the [high-net-worth and] private-banking domain significantly."

Brokerages accounted for nearly half of the 16 institutional clients Xeye had in 2006, according to a recent report by Aite Group, a Boston-based market research and consulting firm. The same source says that most of its users advise clients with between $2 million and $20 million.

Odyssey provides desktop-distributed portfolio-management, advice-delivery and CRM technologies and support for compliance, risk management and analytics.

Xeye's WealthManager suite will continue to be available as a standalone product for wealth-management firms, but as it rolls out improvements they'll be integrated with Odyssey's wealth-management platform and made available to Odyssey's customers.

The Odyssey-Xeye link "creates a powerful new front-office solution set for wealth management," says Xeye's president and CEO Craig O'Neill. "We are very pleased to become part of Odyssey Financial Technologies and believe that the international office network, larger development capacity and Odyssey's long-standing experience will serve Xeye customers well, allow us to further advance our market-leading offering and provide significant new international growth opportunities."

Terms of the transaction weren't disclosed. -FWR

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