Morningstar, Inc. Acquires RightPond, Provider of Defined Contribution and Defined Benefit Business Intelligence for Financial Services Firms

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Mar 31, 2016, 04:26 ET

CHICAGO, March 31, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Morningstar, Inc. (NASDAQ: MORN), a leading provider of independent investment research, has acquired RequiSight, LLC, which does business as RightPond, a provider of business intelligence data and analytics on defined contribution and defined benefit plans for financial services firms. Morningstar acquired RightPond from Rocaton Investment Advisors, LLC, an institutional investment advisor in Norwalk, Connecticut. Terms were not disclosed.

RightPond is a business intelligence and analytics capability that reveals gaps, trends, outliers, and risk signals regarding plan performance, fees, capital flow, gatekeeper relationships, and best practices of defined contribution and defined benefit plans. These plans include corporate retirement plans, including pensions, 403(b)s, and 401(k)s; health and welfare plans; public pension funds; foundations; endowments; and other institutional investors.

Scott Burns, head of asset management solutions for Morningstar, said, "RightPond has a distinct data set and powerful analytics that give institutional investors and advisors a unique way to gather data on where investors in retirement plans are investing their money. By combining RightPond's business intelligence retirement data and analytics with Morningstar's performance and other investment strategy attribute data, we're creating a more complete view of the investment landscape to connect investors with advisors, consultants, and asset managers."

"We created RightPond to leverage technology to generate insights from an abundance of complex data points on retirement plans. When considering the right home for RightPond, we were compelled by the possibilities presented by Morningstar's complementary data sets and tools," James Rhodes, Rocaton's chief technology officer, said. "We are excited to continue using the service as a Morningstar customer."

Morningstar will continue to offer RightPond as a standalone capability until it is integrated into Morningstar® Data and Morningstar Direct^SM, the company's cloud-based investment analysis platform for institutions and advisors. Eventually, the company will rebrand RightPond under the Morningstar name.

RightPond, based in Westport, Connecticut, was first developed in 2012 by Rocaton as a benchmarking tool to help its institutional investors become more efficient at setting strategy and measuring risk. The development team included two data scientists with backgrounds from IBM Research who tackled the daunting task of harnessing massive sets of structured and unstructured data. The company created a data extraction, normalization, and analytics platform and commercialized it in early 2014 as RightPond.

About Morningstar, Inc.
Morningstar, Inc. is a leading provider of independent investment research in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. The company offers an extensive line of products and services for individual investors, financial advisors, asset managers, and retirement plan providers and sponsors. Morningstar provides data on more than 510,000 investment offerings, including stocks, mutual funds, and similar vehicles, along with real-time global market data on more than 17 million equities, indexes, futures, options, commodities, and precious metals, in addition to foreign exchange and Treasury markets. Morningstar also offers investment management services through its investment advisory subsidiaries, with more than $180 billion in assets under advisement and management as of Dec. 31, 2015. The company has operations in 27 countries.

Caution Concerning Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements as that term is used in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based on our current expectations about future events or future financial performance. Forward-looking statements by their nature address matters that are, to different degrees, uncertain, and often contain words such as "may," "could," "expect," "intend," "plan," "seek," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "predict," "potential," or "continue." These statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause the events we discuss not to occur or to differ significantly from what we expect. For us, these risks and uncertainties include, among others, liability for any losses that result from an actual or claimed breach of our fiduciary duties; failing to maintain and protect our brand, independence, and reputation; failing to differentiate our products and continuously create innovative, proprietary research tools; failing to respond to technological change, keep pace with new technology developments, or adopt a successful technology strategy; liability related to our storage of personal information related to individuals as well as portfolio and account-level information; compliance failures, regulatory action, or changes in laws applicable to our investment advisory or credit rating operations; downturns in the financial sector, global financial markets, and global economy; the effect of market volatility on revenue from asset-based fees; a prolonged outage of our database, technology-based products and services, or network facilities; challenges faced by our non-U.S. operations, including the concentration of data and development work at our offshore facilities in China and India; and trends in the mutual fund industry, including the increasing popularity of passively managed investment vehicles. A more complete description of these risks and uncertainties can be found in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended Dec. 31, 2015. If any of these risks and uncertainties materialize, our actual future results may vary significantly from what we expected. We do not undertake to update our forward-looking statements as a result of new information or future events.

MORN-C

Media Contacts:
Margaret Kirch Cohen, +1 312-696-6383 or [email protected]
Nadine Youssef, +1 312-696-6601 or [email protected]

Investors may submit questions to [email protected].

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SOURCE Morningstar, Inc.