Clearwater Analytics has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Beacon, a provider of cross-asset class modeling and risk analytics for derivatives, private credit and debt, structured products and other alternative assets, and Bistro, Blackstone’s proprietary portfolio visualization software platform built for Blackstone’s Credit & Insurance business.
Clearwater will acquire Beacon for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $560m, 60% of which will be paid in cash, with the remainder to be paid in shares of Clearwater Class A common stock valued at approximately $30.05 per share. With ARR of approximately $44m at the end of 2024, this platform has scale and market acceptance as a leading risk and modeling platform.
The purchase price for the Bistro software is $125m, of which $10m will be paid in cash and the remainder will be paid in shares of Class A common stock, valued at $30.00 per share. This transaction represents the purchase of a platform developed by Blackstone.
Clearwater will use the proceeds from its previously committed $800m Term Loan B, cash on hand, and a portion of its $200m revolving line of credit to fund the acquisitions of Beacon and Bistro and the previously announced acquisition of Enfusion.
“These transactions bring the critical IP needed to build a disruptive, end-to-end platform for the investment management industry. Integrating these platforms into a single, seamless solution will require intense focus and execution over the next year or two, but I’m confident in our ability to deliver. As we complete this work, we expect our customers to be completely delighted,” said Sandeep Sahai, CEO at Clearwater Analytics.
For insurance companies and asset owners, these acquisitions represent a fully integrated technology stack for investment management that combines pre-trade, post-trade and risk all in one platform. It will bring all their public and private assets into a single analytics framework, obviating the need for constant upgrades, endless reconciliation and error-prone manual processing. This platform will also enable efficient asset liability matching and regulatory reporting and lower the cost of doing business.
For asset managers, this will mean eliminating inefficiencies in managing private credit, real estate debt, structured products and alternative investments. Clearwater will be the only SaaS platform capable of providing a complete, real-time understanding of exposures, cash flow dynamics and risk correlations across strategies, geographies and asset types. Client reporting that includes a comprehensive view of all their public and private assets and scenario modeling will be dramatically enhanced.
“With this combination, Chief Investment and Chief Risk Officers will have a unified, real-time view of their entire portfolio—from public equities and private credit to structured products and alternatives—all in a single, cloud-native platform. The Clearwater platform will allow them to drill down and comprehensively understand their exposure to a company, industry or geography across all their investments, public and private. That will, in turn, allow them to model their entire portfolio, evaluate cash flows and understand risk. Add to that the industry-leading pre-trade capabilities of the Enfusion platform, and the industry will have a true front-to-back platform, enhancing their ability to make better investment decisions,” said Sandeep Sahai, CEO at Clearwater Analytics.
“This is an incredible moment—not just for Beacon, but for the entire industry,” said Kirat Singh, CEO of Beacon. “Our platform is already integrated with Clearwater and Enfusion at many of our shared clients, delivering best-in-class risk, performance and pre-trade functionality. By bringing these platforms together, along with Blackstone’s Bistro, we’re creating something truly industry-leading—giving institutional investors complete transparency across front office, pre-trade, risk and accounting. We believe no one else can offer this level of depth, and I couldn’t be more excited for what’s ahead.”
“Technology is critical to everything we do, including how we interface with key investors who are broadening their exposure to private credit assets. We built the Bistro platform to address a need we saw in the market both for ourselves and our clients to have a more advanced credit portfolio insights platform. Clearwater has an exciting opportunity to continue evolving this core infrastructure platform for the credit asset management industry and we look forward to helping them build something that creates enduring value,” said John Stecher, Chief Technology Officer of Blackstone.
Michael Chae, Blackstone Vice Chairman & Chief Financial Officer, added: “The culture of innovation at Blackstone extends across how we develop both investment and operational solutions, and the value creation represented by Bistro is a reflection of that.”
“PIMCO has had a strategic partnership and minority stake in Beacon since 2018 and is highly supportive of the combination with Clearwater. Our partnership with Beacon has enabled us to accelerate the development of market-leading risk and analytics tools on behalf of our clients. We are excited to build upon this long-standing partnership with Clearwater and to explore even more opportunities which create value for our clients globally,” said John Kirkowski, Managing Director and Chief Financial Officer of PIMCO.
The Front Office Has a Stake in T+1 Readiness
By Daniel Carpenter, CEO of Meritsoft, a Cognizant company
Standfirst: T+1 will be an operations team priority but there’s something in it for the front office
Europe has set 11 October 2027 as the day it moves to T+1 with the EU, UK and Switzerland all moving in Tandem. But with 14 clearing houses and 32 central securities depositories that all need to be coordinated, it will not be an easy task.
For many firms, budget allocation and plans to upgrade systems have already begun. This will allow 2026 to be used as a year to implement new systems and software and where 2027 can be focused on testing, final preparations and gaining operational benefits in advance of the deadline.
Responsibility for this market moving event lies primarily with the operations team and other back office functions to be prepared. In this industry, the unfortunate reality often sees back office upgrades falling to the wayside, as demands from the revenue generating front office take precedent.
But there are major costs that inevitably hit deal profitability, associated with addressing T+1 manually, which should make the front office sit up and take notice.
For processes that could not be automated, either because of time or budget, staff numbers were increased as T+1 went live in the US in May 2024. A survey published in September 2024 by Citi found that 44% of firms were significantly impacted by increased headcount in the middle and back office. Half of companies indicated that securities lending and funding/margining were also severely increased due to the shortened settlement cycle.
These challenges can lead to lost revenue due to the likes of early stock recalls or holding more cash to meet funding requirements. Settlement fails also incur costs from interest claims of trade counterparties and – in the EU – regulatory penalties from CSDR.
Improving settlement efficiency is not just about being ready for T+1, it will also enable the wider business to find and unlock capital efficiencies.
Known unknowns
It is hard to fully quantify the losses caused by settlement fails. They are known unknowns. Without the transparency created by centralising all the relevant data, firms have a poor view of how fails affect their wider trading operations.
A better overview using granular data from in-house systems, custodians, CSDs and trade counterparties will help predict which firms might be more prone to fail at certain times or for specific types of securities.
This level of transparency will enable firms to make more strategic decisions, for example, on their stock lending and recall activities, which will be key given the expectation that settlement fails will increase under T+1.
The front office needs to be much more cognizant that if a trade fails there is a cost to that, through the added expense of stock borrowing or penalties for the fail to both the counterparty and the regulator.
Optimising post-trade
In the quest for better capital efficiency, firms have focused on what the front office knows, pre-trade. Regulation has meant best execution has been relentlessly pursued. Traders select the venue with the best price, using the right order type and trade at the correct time of day, tapping into multiple data streams to ensure best execution.
T+1 can help jump start the conversation that many post-trade processes remain unoptimised and that there are efficiencies to be realised.
While there is plenty of data to make sure a trader is getting the best bid/offer, less attention is being paid to how fails can influence the balance sheet. The data exists to alert a front office trader that there could be added costs to a trade by predicting when fails may occur. Historical trends can help inform future settlement fail risk – that information just needs to be captured and analysed.
As firms continue to squeeze more efficiency out of pre-trade, there are still plenty of areas left in post-trade where a central repository of settlement data can drive capital efficiency for the entire business.
Getting ready for T+1 may seem like an exercise of regulatory compliance, but there’s something in it for the front office as well.