Planned sale prompts hard look at post-trade firms

Plans to sell MarkitServ fuel warnings about middleware vendors’ future

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Businesses get bought and sold all the time. But sale plans announced last week have raised fresh questions about the future of a whole class of firms: the business is MarkitServ, IHS Markit’s derivatives-processing arm, and the timing coincides with profound changes sweeping through the post-trade sector. 

Vendors of middleware, messaging and reconciliation services that connect, compare and match details of derivatives trades are facing headwinds on several fronts. Post-crisis regulation has