Cyber Monday for Financial Markets

I'm sure the British readers among us were thoroughly baffled by police trying to rein in stampeding shoppers at Tesco a couple of Fridays back.

The scenes, while not quite as appalling as those that seem to come out of the US every year around the dreaded Black Friday sales, were startling in their mimicry of obsessive-compulsive consumerist culture, all of which boiled down to the fact that if you reduce a television by a couple of hundred quid, people are quite happy to punch each other to death over it.

When I worked in bars during university and after, Black Friday had an entirely different connotation. It was the last Friday before Christmas, the last of the office parties, the last day for many, who used the rest of their annual leave to book the immediate time preceding December 25 off work.

If any of you watch The Walking Dead, and are familiar with the scenes of baying hordes, clustered at a fence, trying anything to satiate their terrible hunger... well. You're not alone.

An altogether more genteel modern phenomenon is Cyber Monday, where online retailers drop their prices by small amounts and try their hardest to convince you that you're getting a great deal. Visa does swimming business that day.

Apparently financial-market firms do too, if the scenes last week were any indication.

In a single day, as a snapshot of mergers and acquisitions activity, Aviva bought Friends Life and created an insurance juggernaut, SS&C Technologies bought DST Global Systems and instantly created a Eurasian market for itself, and Silver Lake Partners sold IPC Systems for billions. SmartStream, in an odd turn of events, bought Credit Suisse's proprietary expense management software, despite the fact it already operates its own.

It's not the only time that December has proven to be a solid month for M&A. Last year, EuroCCP and EMCF completed their merger and IBM took a substantial stake in ADTS, Dexia's tech arm.

In 2012, of course, just after most financial reporters had started to break for Christmas, IntercontinentalExchange announced its acquisition of NYSE Euronext. SIX bought Oslo Clearing, Getco outlined its acquisition plans for Knight Capital, and Hong Kong Exchange completed on its purchase of the London Metal Exchange.

In 2011, the merged BATS Chi-X revealed the structure of its executive committee, and Getco made more inroads by purchasing Bank of America's designated market-maker unit on the NYSE floor.

Is this flurry of activity the precursor to some major consolidation within the vendor space? Perhaps, but years of experience have taught me that it's a fool's game to start predicting that.

I'm certainly hearing things about troubles at some cloud providers, and a certain large-scale, London-headquartered vendor being shopped around, but nothing that would convince of a "trend" as such. But as always, if you have information to the contrary, feel free to tip me in confidence.