Brady – Business as Usual Again
In the last few weeks, Brady has issued a number of announcements signaling that its back to business as usual for the UK-based E/CTRM supplier. These include new customer wins, successful implementations, partnerships and upgrades. A visit to its website will also establish that Brady is now a private company and has delisted from the AIM in London after being successfully acquired by PE firm Hanover Investors. The company continues to be managed by CEO, Ms. Carmen Carey, who successfully guided Brady through the transition from public company to private entity and has invigorated the business from top to bottom in the process.
Brady has a new Chairman, Mr. Matthew Peacock, and three new non-executive directors – Mr. Jog Dhody, Mr. Nick Greatorex and Mr. Ian Powell of Hanover Investors. They join Ms. Carey and newly appointed CFO, Nadya Bentley, and non-executive directors, 25-year industry veterans, Dan Look and Iain Greig, on the Brady Board. “The Brady team sees an exciting future ahead as a Hanover Investors portfolio company. Hanover’s expertise in supporting B2B software businesses to realise their full potential is a significant advantage for us as we bring our strategy to life,” Ms. Carey told ComTech. Hanover Investors’ Mathew Peacock told us that “Our decision to acquire Brady was underpinned by its large and loyal customer base, extensive and functionally rich solutions and deep in-house expertise. We have previously achieved great success with B2B software companies similar to Brady and see great potential in this latest investment. We look forward to working with Carmen and the Brady team to build a bright and successful future for all stakeholders.”
Meanwhile, Brady signaled a new metals customer late in 2019 as VMI went live with a Brady “Quick Start” physical trading solution for metals. Based in Dubai, VMI’s managing director was quoted as follows in the announcement, “The current Short-Range outlook suggests that global steel demand will continue to grow in 2020, more than we expected in these challenging times, mainly due to China. In the rest of the world, steel demand slowed in 2019 as uncertainty, trade tensions and geopolitical issues weighed on investment and trade. Manufacturing, particularly the auto industry, has performed poorly contracting in many countries, however in construction, despite some slowing, a positive momentum has been maintained. While the global economic outlook is highly unpredictable, we expect to see further growth in steel demand in 2020 of 1.7%, with emerging and developing economies excluding China contributing more. This forecast faces significant downside risks if the current level of uncertainty prevails. We selected Brady’s ‘Quick Start’ solution for its ability to meet the essential capabilities were looking for, at the right price point, in the quickest timeframe possible.’
This was followed by an announcement that Milan-based Prysmian had selected its financial trading and risk management solution to support business growth in North America. Prysmian has been a Brady user for more than 10-years but following its acquisition of General Cables in the US, it needed to harmonize its trading and risk IT landscape choosing to go with Brady in the process. Head of Base Metals Corporate Purchasing for Prysmian Group said “Brady’s solution has been indispensable in supporting our hedging and risk management activities across Europe for over 10 years. As our business expands to new markets, we require a robust solution to handle higher volumes of trade transactions, trade more instruments, manage larger positions and the flexibility to meet the nuances of regional exchanges. Brady demonstrated ease of extensibility of our existing solution to deliver on these requirements to the acquired US business.”
On the energy side, Brady has also seen some success with leading renewables player, Milan-based Falck Renewables selected Brady to optimize its asset management in Europe and support business growth. ‘We are highly impressed by the breadth of Brady’s suite of products. In particular, the automated data processing and calculations engine and the ease of connecting to the major regional power hubs’, said Francesco Benvenuto, Head of Energy Management, Falck Renewables S.p.a. This was followed with an announcement that BKW, another long-term Brady customer using its European Scheduling solution to deliver power across much of Europe in real-time, had ‘opted to migrate to Brady Cloud Services to achieve greater efficiencies and enter new markets faster, supporting its future growth objectives.’ “Brady’s scheduling solution is central to our pan European power trading operations. Our decision to migrate the functions our teams depend on daily to the cloud was driven by our corporate IT strategy. We aim to achieve greater efficiencies and lower IT costs across the company in the long-term via the cloud. This migration will also allow us to scale scheduling operations to other markets even quicker, to support future growth objectives,” said Patrick Truninger, Leiter Business Solutions, BKW.
Meanwhile, Brady also announced an agreement to ‘introduce Paxos’ commodities and FX Post-Trade automation service to Brady’s customers, thereby achieving significant time and cost savings in Brady’s OTC trade confirmation process.’
With Brady now a private company, it will set about building on these announcements and will do so free of the costs and scrutiny of being a public company. “Delighting our customers continues to remain our top priority. We are privileged to have an impressive global base of loyal customers who continue to invest further in Brady, and I would like to thank them for their loyalty and support over the years. With the backing from Hanover investors and access to their expertise and resources, the future for Brady is bright, and we are now in a position to execute against our aspirations and focus on leading in our core markets and providing a superlative service to our customers. We look forward to communicating with the market about our plans over the coming months,” said Ms. Carey. It is back to business as usual for Brady and ComTech will be watching how events unfold at the company going forward.
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