Bridge Information Systems

» see bridge.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Bridge started in St. Louis in 1974 when a group of investment analysts bought a computer firm off Dean Witter and pointed it at market data. For twenty years it stayed what that description implies, a solid regional business selling equity prices and analytics to American institutions while Reuters ran the world and Bloomberg took over the trading desk one box at a time. Then in March 1995 the private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson and Stowe bought it, and the business got a new theory about itself.

The theory was consolidation. Under chief executive Tom Wendel, Bridge bought ten companies in five years. The first was Knight-Ridder Financial News in August 1996 for $275 million, which turned a data vendor into a newswire overnight. The biggest in reputation terms was Telerate, the bond and foreign exchange screen that Dow Jones had spent a decade mismanaging, picked up in 1998 for $510 million. There was a broker-dealer, Bridge Trading. There was a network business, Savvis, built to carry Bridge's own feeds and then floated as its own company. By May 2000 the headcount had gone from around 500 to 5,000, with 600 reporters in 100 countries and a New York headquarters holding a thousand people.

None of it was paid for out of earnings. The acquisitions were financed, and what the debt bought was ten incompatible data platforms with ten customer bases who each wanted their old screen back. Bridge was selling terminals into a market where Bloomberg's single box did everything and Reuters had the international distribution. The debt service arrived on schedule regardless. On 15 February 2001 Bridge Information Systems filed for Chapter 11 in the Eastern District of Missouri, and in the bankruptcy record that date is simply called the Petition Date.

I have never touched a market data terminal and almost nobody reading this has. Bridge sold to institutions at institutional prices, so the only civilians who ever saw the product were people whose job put them in front of one. It belongs here anyway, because it is the company that bought Telerate, and Telerate is already buried on this site. Bridge is the reason that grave has four owners in its byline.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the shopping list ~

Read the acquisitions in order and you can watch a strategy turn into a reflex. Knight-Ridder Financial in 1996 for the news. Telerate in 1998 for the fixed income and foreign exchange screens. Along the way Bridge also collected trading systems and a network carrier, and the pitch to customers became that one vendor now covered the equity desk and the fixed income desk together. The pitch was accurate. What it left out was that every one of those products still ran on its own stack, so a customer who bought both desks got two separate systems and a bill for each.

~ the petition ~

Chapter 11 in February 2001 did not switch the screens off. The terminals kept serving data all year while the estate was carved up in court, which is the ordinary way a data business dies: the customers cannot be interrupted, so the company is sold out from under them a piece at a time. Reuters bid, and on 30 April 2001 the deal was announced: the core North American equities information and trading operations for $275 million in cash. The total Reuters consideration came to $373 million once interim funding and the Savvis debt financing were counted.

~ who got which piece ~

Reuters announced the closing on 24 September 2001 and began integrating the content operation along with the Bridge Trading broker-dealer. Telerate went its own way again, sold to MoneyLine Network for $10 million, a number worth holding next to the $510 million Bridge had paid for it three years earlier. Savvis survived as an independent hosting and network company and outlived its former parent by two decades before CenturyLink absorbed it. The Bridge name went into Reuters and did not come out.

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