Wolters Kluwer makes major tech buy in Europe

Wolters Kluwer announced it has penned an agreement with Belgian fintech Isabel Group to acquire its accountancy portfolio of cloud-based financial workflow and data exchange solutions.

This includes digital bookkeeping software provider CodaBox; accounting collaboration platform ClearFacts; invoice tracking and debt collection solution Clearnox; and electronic invoicing solutions Zoomit and Flowin.

Wolters Kluwer bought the entire portfolio for €325 million ($351 million USD) in cash.

Wolters Kluwer and Isabel Group have an established, long-standing relationship and partnership. This portfolio complements Wolters Kluwer’s existing European tax and accounting solutions and enables it to provide end-to-end coverage of the accountants’ workflow from pre-accounting to post-accounting. More than 130 full time employees, based in Belgium and France, will join Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting Europe, which spans ten countries in Europe.

The move comes shortly after Wolters Kluwer released CCH Tagetik Tax Provision & Reporting for multinationals, to support finance and tax leaders in multinational companies by offering data collection and group tax provision calculations (including current, deferred and effective tax rate), and by enabling group tax reporting for financial consolidation figures. 

It also comes at a time when more and more countries in the European Union are mandating electronic invoicing as per a directive approved in 2014 which was part of a wider push for greater interoperability between financial systems. Countries where e-invoicing requirements are already fully or partially in effect include Hungary, Italy, Belgium and Greece, with other countries like France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Croatia, Ireland and others in different stages of advancement.

This in mind, other companies—such as Thomson Reuters—have also been making preparations for these eventual mandates and the software solutions that will be needed to stay compliant with them.

While behind Europe, the U.S. has also been increasingly interested in electronic invoicing: recently, the Digital Business Networks Alliance, a nonprofit backed by the Federal Reserve that serves as the legal entity overseeing the US open Exchange Framework, announced the first successful electronic invoice transmission over the U.S. network. The first invoice exchange occurred between two DBNAlliance service providers — Avalara and Storecove. Storecove received the invoice, issued by Avalara. The transaction was executed from Avalara’s E-Invoicing and Live Reporting solution leveraging the DBNAlliance Exchange Framework for message transfer, process descriptions and document content exchange. The invoice was successfully transferred and imported by Storecove’s e-invoicing and reporting solution, where it was processed and is now ready to be paid.