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Bureau Veritas ditched talks with UK’s Intertek to seek €31bn Swiss deal

Anglo-French tie-up discussions shelved in favour of possible deal with rival SGS

France’s Bureau Veritas broke off merger discussions with FTSE 100 group Intertek in favour of pursuing a €31bn combination with Swiss rival SGS, underscoring the appetite to consolidate in the certification sector.

Bureau Veritas and SGS are in advanced negotiations over a Franco-Swiss tie-up, billed as a merger of equals, people with direct knowledge of the talks told the Financial Times.

But immediately before starting talks with SGS, Bureau Veritas was in long-running merger discussions with Intertek, the people said. A tie-up with Intertek would have positioned the combined company as an Anglo-French champion in the certification sector.

People close to those talks with Intertek, which collapsed in late autumn 2024, said Bureau Veritas’s cornerstone shareholder Wendel, a French investment firm, saw greater potential in a deal with SGS and has encouraged the merger discussions. 

Another person said a combination between SGS and Bureau Veritas had less execution risk and that the two continental companies would be a better cultural fit than an Anglo-European merger.

Together, Bureau Veritas and SGS would have about 8 per cent of the growing €160-180bn testing and certification industry, which spans services from food safety inspections to engineering compliance checks on buildings, according to a person close to the negotiations.

The Swiss company, which has a market value of SFr16.1bn (€17.2bn), would in effect be taking over Bureau Veritas, which is worth €13.7bn after its shares rose on reports of the advanced talks. The two companies are hoping to cut more than €400mn in costs as part of the deal, one person said.

In contrast, the French company would have been the larger party in a combination with London-listed Intertek, which has a market value of £7.9bn (€9.4bn) and is led by French executive André Lacroix.

Wendel is being advised by boutique firm Zaoui & Co and owns 26.5 per cent of Bureau Veritas but has been looking to sell down its stake. It sold 9 per cent of the company in 2024, including 4 per cent to a fund run by French state investment bank Bpifrance.

Any final agreement is expected to include lock up provisions for key shareholders, said one person close to the talks. Belgian-based investor Groupe Bruxelles Lambert owns 19.1 per cent of SGS.

Bureau Veritas is working with Morgan Stanley, while SGS is being advised by Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.

Intertek, Bureau Veritas, SGS, Wendel and Bpifrance declined to comment.

Markets reacted to the potential deal with scepticism, with the companies’ combined market value falling on news of the talks.

“There are real question marks around the scope for immediate value creation,” said Mark Kelly, of MKP Advisors, who added that the longer-term benefits of a deal would come from improvement in productivity.

“This probably suits both anchor shareholders. Wendel, as sellers, get a smaller stake in a bigger business,” he added.

The details of any deal are expected to attract attention in France, given the stake held by Bpifrance and the fact that Bureau Veritas entered the CAC40 index of French blue-chip companies in December. 

The optics of a French industry leader being taken over by a foreign rival, in particular, could create political friction.

The Elysée and finance ministry have been briefed on the negotiations in recent days, as has the prime minister’s office, according to two of the people, while Bpifrance is part of the talks.

The talks between SGS and Bureau Veritas have reminded some advisers following the situation closely of the construction merger of France’s Lafarge and Switzerland’s Holcim in 2014.

That deal was another supposed merger of equals driven by powerful shareholders, but faced a cultural clash between the two companies and failed to deliver on the promise of the tie-up.

Fifty-fifty joint venture would bring together 2 of the biggest European investment groups

The owner of France’s Natixis Investment Managers and Italian insurer Generali are close to announcing an agreement to create an asset management joint venture that would bring together two of the biggest European names in the sector.

Under the terms of the tie-up, BPCE and Generali Investments will combine their asset management operations in a 50-50 joint venture, people familiar with the situation said. A non-binding preliminary agreement could be reached as early as next week. It would still need to be approved by the relevant unions and authorities. 

Woody Bradford, the head of Generali’s investment division, is expected to be appointed as chief executive, while Nicolas Namias, chair of Natixis and chief executive of its owner BPCE, is set to be appointed as chair. 

The deal comes as consolidation is sweeping across the industry, with groups searching for scale in the face of declining margins, the need for investment in technology and the growing might of the largest US participants.

Natixis has €1.2tn in assets under management and operates a multi-boutique model, which owns majority stakes in 15 active managers that continue to be run by their original management. 

Generali had €632bn in assets under management as of September 30, run across a platform of 12 affiliated asset management firms investing in public and private markets, of which about 40 per cent is managed for third-party clients and the remainder for its parent insurer.

European banks, insurers and independent groups are evaluating their commitment to asset management, weighing up whether to double down, partner with others in pursuit of scale or withdraw from the sector. 

Pulling off full-blown mergers and acquisitions in asset management is fraught with difficulties and firms are increasingly turning to strategic partnerships. The Financial Times revealed in November that the two sides were exploring a potential tie-up.

The deal would allow both BPCE and Generali to retain exposure to their earnings from asset management. It is seeking to combine a capital-rich insurance company that is growing but needs more asset management products, with a business that has strong third-party distribution in retail and wholesale markets, and a number of well-respected boutiques, including Harris Associates and Loomis Sayles.

For Generali, which receives inflows each year from its life insurance business, it makes sense to invest this money in an asset manager where it has an economic interest, rather than giving it to an external one to manage.

Generali is also expected to continue to provide seed capital to create new funds and expand existing strategies.

The tie-up with Generali would be the latest deal struck by BPCE chief Namias since he took over at the head of the French lender in 2022, after BPCE also acquired Société Générale’s Equipment Finance unit last year for €1.1bn.

Meanwhile, Generali set out it stall in asset management with the 2023 acquisition of US group Conning from Cathay Life.

Generali’s chief executive Philippe Donnet told investors in August that the Italian insurer would focus on building a global asset management platform and remained “convinced of the power of the combination between life insurance and asset management”.

Last year French insurance group Axa agreed a deal to combine its asset management business with that of BNP Paribas Asset Management after concluding that it was subscale. Axa had previously explored an asset management combination with Natixis.

Germany’s Allianz and French asset manager Amundi have held talks over a potential transaction but paused discussions in December amid disagreements over how best to structure at potential transaction, the FT reported.

BPCE, Natixis and Generali declined to comment.

The need to analyze an overwhelming influx of stock data—and to do it fast—pushed Man Group to become its own kind of tech company

A tool for crunching billions of rows and millions of columns of data is the stuff of nightmares for some. For London-based hedge fund Man Group, it was a dream.

When the firm couldn’t find something on the market to, for example, consistently and quickly pull and analyze the entire universe of daily stock prices for all time, it sought to make it a reality.

The result is ArcticDB, an open-source tech tool the firm developed internally over the course of a decade and is beginning to commercialize now among customers like financial software and media company Bloomberg. Bloomberg signed on in 2023 and has been working with Man Group to build on the tool ever since.

“I do think there’s a big shift in the financial markets and especially the capital markets, this awareness that our customers need to be able to leverage large data and more and more data sets, and they need to build more rigorous models,” Bloomberg Chief Technology Officer Shawn Edwards said.

Man Group was founded in 1783 and managed about $175 billion in assets as of last September.

The “tic” in its ArcticDB refers to tick data, or the minute individual price changes that occur every time a stock is traded, sometimes just microseconds apart. The tool was designed to handle the enormous stream of tick data that comes in every day, though it can also use daily or weekly stock price data.

“Think of it as like an industrial-scale crunching of enormous things that look a bit like Excel spreadsheets,” said Man Group Chief Technology Officer Gary Collier, referring to Microsoft’s ubiquitous spreadsheet tool.

But it isn’t simply a jumbo-capacity Excel. ArcticDB users primarily see and write lines of code, and while they can run models on the data that present smaller relevant charts, they aren’t looking directly at the mother of all spreadsheets.

Man Group’s quantitative analysts, or quants, use the tool to analyze markets, build risk reports and look for signals to help them “find alpha”—in other words, capture above-average returns on investments.

Man Group is working to commercialize ArcticDB as financial markets companies, and capital markets companies in particular, are seeking increasingly sophisticated technology for ever more rigorous data analysis, Edwards said.

Bloomberg has licensed ArcticDB and built it into its BQuant analytics tools, which it sells to financial services companies. The need to conduct time-series analysis across a large number of data points is only growing, Edwards said. Bloomberg ingests over 400 billion market ticks every single day.

To be sure, there are other powerful data analysis tools on the market. For example, Excel can display about one million cells on the grid, but can process still-larger data sets via aggregation and cloud processing, Microsoft said.

And other tools have been built to handle enormous data volume, said Jason Strimpel, founder of PyQuant News, a resource hub for quants and tech finance professionals. But ArcticDB stands out for its speed and the way it naturally integrates into existing data ecosystems, Strimpel said.

The tool hasn’t seen drastic uptake among other hedge funds since its introduction, however, perhaps partly because it competes with existing workflows and partly because some hedge funds might be wary of using tech created by a competitor, Strimpel said.

Bloomberg’s Edwards believes its applications could also go beyond finance to industries like pharmaceutical research.

“More machine learning and data science is being applied in every field,” he said. “And you need these kinds of tools if you want to do that kind of quick analysis, experimentation, exploration of data.”

Trends in breast, prostate and lung cancer are shifting who is most at-risk

The face of cancer in the U.S. is getting younger—and more feminine.

Cancer rates for women in the U.S. have risen over the past half-century, particularly among women under age 65 diagnosed with breast cancer, the American Cancer Society said Thursday. Men, meanwhile, have experienced a decline in cancer rates compared with prior decades.

“If you’re a woman under the age of 65, you’re now more likely to develop cancer than a man” in that same age group, said Dr. William Dahut, the American Cancer Society’s chief scientific officer.

For decades, the cancer burden in the U.S. was higher for men, who started smoking en masse in the 20th century. Their rates of lung-cancer cases and deaths soared. Lung cancer remains the biggest cancer killer for men in the U.S., but case and death rates have dropped, after smoking rates declined.

Women started smoking heavily later than men and have been slower to quit, so their lung-cancer decline started later and hasn’t been as steep.

That has had a significant impact: Lung cancer incidence among women under 65 was greater than among men for the first time in 2021. Women are also more likely to get diagnosed with lung cancer as nonsmokers.

“This is really a transformational change,” Dahut said.

The overall cancer death rate in the U.S. has dropped 34% since 1991, the report said, translating to nearly 4.5 million fewer deaths. The progress is largely thanks to the declines in cigarette smoking, as well as better cancer screenings and treatments. The number of averted deaths is twice as large for men than for women.

About 1.1 men were diagnosed with cancer for each case among women in 2021. That is down from a high of 1.6 diagnoses among men for each woman in 1992.

Men’s overall cancer rates spiked in the early ’90s, when widespread prostate-cancer screening led to a surge of small, low-risk prostate cancers, in addition to dangerous cases being caught earlier. When doctors pulled back on the tests, which look for levels of prostate-specific antigen in blood, case rates dropped nearly 40%, the report said. They remain below that peak.

“We’re doing a better job detecting cancers that need to be tracked and followed,” said Dr. Stephen Gruber, a cancer epidemiologist and geneticist at City of Hope in Duarte, Calif. “We’re not just blasting everybody with PSA testing.”

Breast-cancer rates have increased about 1% each year over the past decade, with steeper rises among younger women, contributing to the flip in cancer risk. In 2007, cancer rates for women between 50-64 were 21% lower than for their male peers. In 2021, women’s rates passed men’s.

Among adults under 50, women already faced a higher cancer risk. The cancer rate for these women was 82% greater than for their male peers in 2021, compared with 51% higher in 2002, because of thyroid and breast cancers. Increases in colorectal and testicular cancers among younger men were offset by declines in others including prostate.

“The change in cancer among women, especially younger women, is really shocking,” said Dr. Karen Kim, a health disparities researcher and dean of the Penn State College of Medicine.

More women having children later or not at all likely contributes to the trend, because having children at earlier ages and breastfeeding lower the risk of some kinds of breast cancers. Increasing obesity rates, physical inactivity and rates of heavy alcohol consumption among younger women are also potential factors, researchers said.

The breast-cancer death rate has dropped 44% since 1989, thanks to better treatments and screening. It is still the leading cause of cancer death for women under 50.

The emergence of a powerful tech elite close to Donald Trump has jarring echoes with Russia

As a reporter in Russia in the 1990s, I covered the ways in which a handful of oligarchs made out like bandits in the post-Soviet anarchy of the times. Following a pact hatched in Davos, they intervened heavily to help secure the re-election of president Boris Yeltsin in 1996. That led to what was called the semibankirshchina — or rule of the seven bankers — until some of the oligarchs fell out among themselves and, more terminally, with Yeltsin’s successor Vladimir Putin.

As is sometimes said, history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And there are jarring echoes in the emergence of an oligarchy in the US today, revolving around some of the Magnificent Seven tech companies. “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy,” Joe Biden warned this week in his farewell speech as president. It was up to politicians, lawyers and the American people to confront this “tech industrial complex”, he said.

Led by Elon Musk, who spent more than $250mn helping to re-elect Donald Trump, tech bosses have been filing into Mar-a-Lago to trade favours with the incoming president and donate to his inauguration fund. What might we learn from the playbook and experience of their Russian forerunners?

Above all else, as cold-headed business people, oligarchs expect a return on their investment. In Russia, they benefited massively from the infamous loans-for-shares scheme, a rigged privatisation process that enabled them to grab control of some of the country’s most valuable oil and metals companies, including Yukos, Sibneft and Norilsk Nickel, at giveaway prices. 

Nothing comparable will happen in the US. But Musk has already enjoyed a stunning return on his political investment. In the days after Trump’s re-election, the share price of Musk’s car company Tesla surged, adding more than $300bn to its stock market value. There have also been reports that Musk might yet end up as owner of TikTok’s US business if the Chinese-owned parent company is forced to divest this month. 

Musk’s fellow tech titans are also anticipating looser regulation — particularly around antitrust and crypto rules — and more support for their businesses. Meta’s one-time liberal chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who has swivelled as fast as the gymnast Simone Biles by scrapping fact-checking on Facebook, is now urging Trump to defend the US tech industry from meddling regulators abroad.

Given their lack of institutional power, oligarchs try to influence politics by deploying weapons of mass information. So it was in Russia where Vladimir Gusinsky ran the NTV channel and Sevodnya newspaper, while Boris Berezovsky controlled the ORT channel and Kommersant paper. In the US, Musk has turned X into his personal political platform, while Zuckerberg directs Facebook and Amazon’s co-founder Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. 

Russia’s oligarchs went even further in trying to capture the government by joining the government themselves. Following Yeltsin’s re-election, Vladimir Potanin acted briefly as first deputy prime minister. Berezovsky was appointed deputy head of the Security Council. As co-head of Trump’s newly imagined Department of Government Efficiency, Musk is not a regular government employee. But Doge is looking to post recruits across Washington’s federal agencies to recommend ways of slashing costs. Given Musk’s sprawling business activities, the potential conflicts of interest are stark.

Perhaps the biggest lesson to draw from Russia’s oligarchic era, though, is that oligarchs are often lousy at understanding politics. In Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky over-reached, antagonised Putin and spent the next 10 years in jail. Now Putin only tolerates his own house-trained oligarchs who do the Kremlin’s bidding.

As narcissist in chief, Trump will not want to be outshone by others. But the biggest danger for US oligarchs may be a backlash from his excitable Maga base. After clashing with Musk over immigration policy, Steve Bannon, Trump’s rabble-rousing former adviser, denounced the world’s richest man as a “truly evil guy” and vowed to take him down.

Of course, America today differs from 1990s Russia in countless ways. Moreover, stock market investors seem to reckon that an injection of capitalist rigour into government will boost the economy, not disfigure it. But US oligarchs may yet discover that, whatever their differences with their Russian counterparts, the dynamics of power and politics are universal. Those who ride a political tiger — and slip — end up being mauled by it.

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