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Comment by stephenhuey | Hacker News Reader

Before we sold our fintech SaaS startup in 2015, we received a C&D from Dealogic and I thought, wow, we've made it into the big leagues! My adrenaline wore off pretty quickly though, because after our attorney sent them a defiant letter warning their London law firm to not mess with a Texas LLC, we never heard from them again. We were flying below the radar, so we just surmised some Dealogic customer had showed a Dealogic sales rep our product, and they probably carpet bomb anytime they see anyone playing anywhere near their entrenched & wildly expensive product.

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Never heard about Dealogic so I just Googled -- the title of the click says:

> Dealogic: A trusted partner to top financial firms worldwide

Oh well, I probably don't need to dig deeper to know what it does then.

At the risk of sounding very dumb — what were you able to determine from that? I have no idea what it means, almost sounds like the mafia

Edit: their about page sounds even more mafia-esque. “Dealogic connects banks and investors in the only truly global network… Firms who use Dealogic see results in increased profitability and productivity… Whether you want to analyze wallet share, execute a deal, align operating units, manage risk, or comply with regulation, there is only one answer.”

> what were you able to determine from that

I interpret this as: a company that is successful not because it provides a service that is useful or good, but one that other companies - in this case "financial firms" - are FORCED to buy, usually through compliance or regulatory means.

Think of it like an auto insurance company advertising themselves as "your trusted partner on the roads." Yeah I guess, but it's still meaningless.

I'm not as familiar with the compliance part of their solution, so there could be some of what you're talking about. I don't think their software is totally useless, just possibly, um, over-priced, and needing competitors. :)

Our lightweight SaaS was focused on analytics related to share of wallet and return on capital and improving insights into client relationships. With our tool, an investment banker could perform some tasks in seconds or minutes that normally an MD expected a junior analyst to do in hours or days. Not rocket science, but useful. And not as expensive as Dealogic. I wish I could say our creation was taking the world by storm, but we haven't been involved for many years and as so often happens with acquisitions, they didn't really execute well on our original target audience and took it in another direction.

So yes, like the mafia.

I increasingly see less distinction between the various forms of economic rent and organised crime.

The answer is to have Dealogic give them an offer they cannot refuse?

It's sounds like the EPIC pitch in the EHR sector.

EPIC - because everyone else is using it, and boy it sure is hard for our large company to share data with a competitor's product, be a shame if a patient suffered because of it.

But at least it's only in one market, which meant the Feds could step in. https://www.healthit.gov/topic/information-blocking

The shortest, and wildly simplified answer based on my few years of using it, is that Dealogic is basically a humungous database of financial information, often unavailable anywhere else. It's also complex as hell and even pricier, and has an interface reminiscing of the best Win 3.11 times. Cool stuff, from industry user perspective.

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