By Pablo Mayo Cerqueiro, Amy-Jo Crowley and Klaus Lauer
LONDON/BERLIN (Reuters) – Axel Springer is exploring a sale of popular German finance site and trading platform finanzen.net, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The media group, advised by investment bank Houlihan Lokey, has invited bidders to submit indicative offers for the unit in the coming weeks, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the talks are private.
Private equity groups including Cinven, Vitruvian Partners and Verdane were among the parties that were participating in the sale process, one of the sources said.
Finanzen.net could be valued at around 250 million euros ($271 million) in a deal, the second source added.
Spokespeople for Axel Springer and its private equity backer KKR & Co declined to comment. Cinven and Vitruvian declined to comment and Verdane did not respond to a request for comment.
With more than 37 million monthly visits, Karlsruhe-based finanzen.net is one of Germany’s most popular finance sites.
It also runs a low-cost trading platform that takes payments from banking counterparties, according to its website.
The sale efforts come at a time of change for investment brokers and platforms in Europe.
The EU is phasing out ‘payment for order flow’ (PFOF), a practice through which brokers receive payments for forwarding client orders to certain market makers, by 2026.
Axel Springer CEO Mathias Doepfner and Friede Springer, widow of the company’s eponymous founder, took the group private in 2020 with the help of KKR.
The group, the publisher of Politico and Bild, is pushing into artificial intelligence and recently announced a partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
($1 = 0.9226 euros)
(Reporting by Pablo Mayo Cerqueiro, Amy-Jo Crowley and Klaus Lauer; Editing by Anousha Sakoui and Louise Heavens)
