Micropal

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

~ the obituary ~

I was one year old when Micropal was founded, which puts this one well outside anything I can claim to remember. It also sits outside the kind of product this site usually buries. Micropal never had users in the sense of people with accounts. It had subscribers, and they were fund managers and financial advisers and newspaper personal finance desks, and what they were subscribing to was a number.

Christopher Poll started the company in London in 1985 with John Richardson and five other staff. The gap it filled was simple to state and tedious to fill: at the time there was no consistent, comparable, independently calculated record of how mutual funds had actually performed. Each fund reported its own results on its own basis. Micropal collected the underlying data, calculated performance on a common methodology so that two funds could be honestly placed next to each other, and sold the result. If you have ever looked at a fund performance table in a newspaper and taken for granted that the rankings meant something, somebody had to do this work first.

It grew into the global leader in that specific trade. By the mid-1990s Micropal ran about 15 offices, including Hong Kong, continental Europe, Switzerland and the United States, and it was the first mutual fund tracking company to establish itself in Asia, which turned out to be an unusually good call. Staff went from seven to roughly 150. For a company whose entire output was spreadsheets about other people's products, that is a substantial institution.

The McGraw-Hill Companies bought Micropal in November 1997 and folded it into Standard and Poor's, where it operated as the S&P Micropal division. The name lived on for another decade in that hyphenated condition, which is the usual halfway house for an acquired brand with real recognition among specialists. The end came on 16 March 2007, when Morningstar completed its acquisition of Standard and Poor's global fund data business for $55 million, announced three weeks earlier on 22 February. Morningstar picked up performance, rankings and holdings data on more than 135,000 funds across over 30 countries, and the Micropal name went out of service entirely.

~ the case file ~

~ where the domain points now ~

micropal.com still resolves, and it redirects to morningstar.com. That is a cleaner epitaph than most dead companies get. The brand is gone, the London offices are gone, Standard and Poor's kept the ratings business and got out of fund data entirely, but the actual asset is still being served from the address, under a different owner's name. For a data company that counts as a kind of survival. The numbers Micropal existed to produce are still produced. They just have somebody else's logo on them.

~ why a data vendor dies quietly ~

There is no shutdown notice for a company like this, no farewell page, no final login. Micropal's death is a line in an acquisition release and a change in which invoice arrives. That is why the queue that fed this grave had the date recorded as roughly 2000, off by seven years: when a brand is absorbed in stages, first behind a prefix and then not at all, there is no single day that feels like an ending to anybody outside the building.

The useful corrective is that the consolidation itself was the event. Over about ten years the independent fund data trade went from several specialist houses to essentially one dominant name in retail fund research. Micropal was the largest piece absorbed on the way there, and the 2007 sale is what made Morningstar's international coverage credible rather than American.

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