Alpha Financial Markets Consulting, a global provider of specialist consulting services to the financial services industry, has acquired two companies.
White Marble Consulting is a specialist marketing consultancy firm to asset management, wealth management and alternatives clients, and Bankside Financial Solutions Consulting, is a UK based technology consulting firm providing specialist data integration services to the asset and wealth management sector.
The full management teams of both White Marble and Bankside will be joining the Alpha Group as part of the transaction.
Founded in London in 2014 by Twink Field, White Marble has a team of 28 industry specialists across the UK and North America. White Marble brings a very strong track record of delivering marketing services to asset management, wealth management and alternatives clients, and a highly complementary client base.
The addition of White Marble extends the Group’s specialist sector-focussed offering, and the combined expertise of White Marble and Alpha creates a holistic range of client solutions from brand strategy to supporting go-to-market projects, to end-to-end digital and creative services support. The acquisition will enable Alpha to build a leading marketing, brand and creative agency proposition to financial services clients globally.
Bankside, founded in 2018 by Paul Cardosi and Rob Surridge, provides deep technology and data expertise to clients. Alongside a highly skilled management team, Bankside has c. 100 industry practitioners experienced in delivering critical transformations. Asset managers are increasingly moving to and investing further in enterprise platforms such as BlackRock Aladdin, Charles River, SimCorp, and Bloomberg.
Bankside brings unrivalled expertise in data integration and migration in this space, with specific expertise in Snowflake. This includes delivery capability across the latest data cloud offerings and a proprietary tool that enables significant time saving and risk reduction on data migrations and implementations. The combination of Alpha’s leading consulting capability for the asset and wealth management sector and the Bankside team’s deep expertise and toolsets will enhance the Group’s competitive end-to-end offering for clients through large-scale and complex technical implementations.
These acquisitions are an important step for Alpha as it progressively deepens and broadens its service offering to clients, while further supporting its vision to grow at scale and ultimately become the dominant consulting firm to the financial services industry globally. We are delighted to welcome recognised industry leaders to the business, who will enable Alpha to further serve our clients.
Joe Morant (pictured), global head of asset & wealth management consulting, said: “We are delighted to welcome Twink, Paul, Rob, and the wider White Marble and Bankside teams to Alpha. We have worked together for many years on common clients, so today’s news is a logical step in strengthening our relationship – put simply, “Experts recognise expertise”.
“This shared vision of deep asset and wealth management expertise, concentrated further in the branding, marketing services, and investment technology domains, makes this a winning combination. We are excited to add more industry-leading domain expertise to the Alpha platform to benefit our clients.”
Commenting on the acquisition of White Marble, Sam Iles, Head of Ventures & Innovations at Alpha, said: “Over the past ten years, Twink and the wider team have established White Marble as the go-to marketing partner for asset management, wealth management and alternatives clients. Building on this, alongside Alpha’s broader offering as the leading advisory partner to those sectors, offers huge potential. I am hugely excited to work with Twink and her highly talented team, as we build the leading marketing services provider for financial services worldwide.”
Twink Field, founder of White Marble, added: “We are delighted to be joining Alpha and forming a specialist marketing boutique within the Group. We have admired the Alpha business for many years and have already worked together on a range of projects to bring the best integrated solutions to clients. The cultural fit and complementary nature of our capabilities make this a very exciting and natural next step for White Marble. Quality, client service and investment specialism remain integral to our work and will remain our priority going forward, as part of the Alpha Group.”
Commenting on the acquisition of Bankside, Chris Kroeger, head of UK & MENA, Asset and Wealth Management Consulting at Alpha, said: “We are very excited to announce the acquisition of Bankside and further expansion of the Alpha business. This is a hugely complementary acquisition, enabling our clients to benefit from combined management and technology consulting capabilities that can support them in ensuring their technology is up to date, flexible and fully leveraged, and in navigating complex programmes of change.”
Paul Cardosi and Rob Surridge, co-founders of Bankside, added: “We are very pleased with this opportunity to bring together Bankside’s depth of delivery expertise, with the breadth of experience and capability that the Alpha team has to offer. After working closely with Alpha on successful implementations, we found common ground in terms of strategy and approach, which bodes well for future projects. Being able to launch and further develop our new data integration tool with the support of the Alpha team is an exciting prospect.”
Headquartered in the UK, Alpha Financial Markets Consulting is a global consultancy to the financial services industry. Alpha combines highly specialist, sector-focused management consulting and technology expertise to support the client transformation lifecycle. It has over 1,000 consultants globally, operating from 17 client-facing offices spanning the UK, North America, Europe and APAC.
