Morningstar Announces FCSI Acquisition

Today I learned from Financial Advisor Magazine’s breaking news email that Morningstar announced an agreement to buy FCSI, the makers of dbCAMS+ software.  This is important news to me as my firm is a current user of dbCAMS as mentioned here, here, and here at FPPad.com

Click here to see the article on Financial Advisor Magazine.

Click here to see a similar article on Business Week.

We also received an email from Chris Boruff at Morningstar’s advisor channel that provided more specific details on the timetable of the acquisition and what it might mean to current dbCAMS users.

His message is below:

Dear Morningstar client,

We are pleased to tell you that we have entered into an agreement to acquire Financial Computer Support, Inc. (FCSI) a leading provider of practice management software for independent advisors. FCSI’s flagship product, dbCAMS+, is a portfolio management system that allows advisors to easily track and produce client reports as well as manage client contact information and billing. We have seen strong demand for integrated portfolio management solutions like this in our Web-based investment planning platform, Advisor Workstation Office Edition, and felt that offering a similar capability in our Principia suite would be a valuable enhancement.

We plan to incorporate dbCAMS+ into the Principia product line and rebrand it within the next year. By bringing these two software applications together in a single product suite, advisors will have powerful options for integrating investment data and analytics with client performance reports.

Our plan to acquire FCSI demonstrates our commitment to providing robust portfolio management, accounting, and performance reporting capabilities to our independent advisor clients. It also demonstrates our commitment to continuing to invest in Principia. The addition of dbCAMS+ will allow us to offer portfolio management systems, integrated with traditional Morningstar research and analytic capabilities, in both a web-based and CD-ROM software-based solution.

As a valued client, we wanted you to be aware of this exciting news. If you have any questions, please contact your Morningstar account representative.

We expect to complete this acquisition in September 2008. For more information, please see our press release and general questions and answers at http://global.morningstar.com/FCSI.

Sincerely,

Chris Boruff
President, Advisor Business
Morningstar, Inc.

So it remains to be seen how this will all work out, but one can bet that dbCAMS as a stand-alone product will be no more in the coming year.