Trade credit insurance company Coface announced that it has acquired the Canada-based data analytics firm Rel8ed.
Founded in 2015 with the support of Innovate Niagara’s incubator program, Rel8ed has offices in both the US and Canada. It specializes in integrating, cross-referencing, analyzing, and inferring from big data extracted from multiple sources. Rel8ed’s clients include multinational companies, governments, and business associations.
According to Coface, its acquisition of Rel8ed will benefit its trade credit insurance business, as well as enhance the services its business information unit provides to its teams and customers.
“Over the last year, as we partnered with Rel8ed, it has demonstrated a truly distinct set of capabilities to Coface and our clients, in the North America market, where deep insights into mid-market and small businesses are difficult to acquire,” said Coface North America CEO Oscar Villalonga. “Bringing their unique approach and methodology to curating open, public, and alternative data sources will help us expand our database. Ultimately, it will allow us to better accompany our clients which need to closely monitor their credit and supply chain risks.”
“Businesses don’t simply need access to broad data sources, they need predictive analytics and actionable insights to support their business decisions,” added Coface director of strategy and business development Thibault Surer. “We are happy to welcome the experts of Rel8ed into Coface. Adding their talents and skills to our set-up will allow us to continue enriching our data capabilities and get the most out of it for our clients.”
A release noted that the acquisition comes after Coface established a data lab in Paris in 2019, which leverages data science to optimize its products and risk assessments, as well as to develop new services. The acquisition of Rel8ed will strengthen and complement the lab’s function.
On the subject of acquisitions, the latest Quarterly Deal Performance Monitor of WTW found that companies making M&A deals outperformed the wider market by 5.2 percentage points for acquisitions valued over US$100 million between October and December (Q4 2022). This followed a market outperformance of 3.9 percentage points in Q3 2022.
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