DealZone

Activist investors are back and flexing their muscles again after fading into the background during the credit crisis, though they are now dependent on cutting deals with big institutions to get their way.

As technology giants and private equity firms look for potential acquisition targets, customer relationship company Convergys may spark renewed interest, several sources familiar with the situation said.

Putin and Medvedev, Gazprom and Rosneft: the key players in Russia tend to come in pairs. Now state banks Sberbank and VTB are set to strengthen their duopoly as Russia’s financial sector emerges from crisis.

Reuters columnist Felix Salmon discusses the relevancy of exchanges with Andrew Ross Sorkin.

“Top venture-capital firms including Accel Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers are riding the frenzy around companies like Facebook Inc. and Groupon Inc. to raise billions of dollars in new funds, even as the rest of the venture industry struggles to gather money,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

Singapore Exchange has agreed to an $8.3 billion deal for Australia’s ASX. The first major consolidation of Asia-Pacific exchanges faces regulatory hurdles, including getting Australia’s parliament to lift a 15 percent ownership cap on the ASX. *View article *View article on SGX’s CEO *View graphic on world’s top 10 exchanges *View WSJ article

Communications cable maker CommScope said it is in talks with private equity firm The Carlyle Group to sell itself. It is the latest sign of resurgent acquisitions for private equity firms, which are under pressure to invest billions of dollars of capital raised in the past few years. *View article

Wind farm owner and operator First Wind Holdings, which is planning a $300 million IPO this week, may be a risky bet in the current energy climate, write Clare Baldwin and Scott Malone. *View article *View IPOfinancial.com article

Across the different bits of financial services – such as fund management, broker-dealers, insurance, and trading systems – mergers and acquisitions fell sharply in 2009. But Freeman & Co outlines 10 drivers that should make this a busier year for dealmaking:

“1. Banks and insurance companies continue to assess whether their asset management units
are core to their business, especially those that have stand alone brands or are in non-core
markets

2. Large transformational asset management deals will diminish, but deals in the $3-30 billion
AUM range will increase from current lows

The explosion of interest in high-frequency trading has started to drag new faces to sometimes staid industry conferences. Traders who for years worked on algorithms and computer codes behind the scenes are stepping into the spotlight. They’re appearing on more and more panel discussions, feeling the need to defend their practice against the slings and arrows of politicians and regulators.

So far, they’ve managed to mix exasperation with good humor. The head of one high-frequency trading shop, speaking on a panel this week, said that if you believe everything you read in newspapers you might think the practice is “an unfair, highly profitable and socially useless trading strategy implemented by highly secretive and unregulated traders using superfast computers to compete with retail investors, manipulate markets and front run flash orders causing volatility in the financial markets and creating systemic risk.”

He argued that a more accurate definition of high-frequency trading would be, “a wide variety of highly competitive, low margin trading strategies implemented by professional market intermediaries who have invested heavily in technology that have the effect of making the markets more efficient by enhancing liquidity and transparent price discovery to the benefit of investors.”

Faced with big debts and falling revenues, companies across the world are hiring experts and pondering options.

One option is to swap old bonds for new, exchanging looming maturities for redemptions a few years off. Another is to buy back debts trading at discounted prices.

UK broadcaster ITV (ITV.L) is the latest company to swap its bonds, one of the most successful of a string of exchanges Reuters predicted back in April.