In a bid to bolster its appeal to financial services clients, e-discovery group Lighthouse this week announced that it would acquire Swiss consulting and chat messaging platform Forexus. The acquisition will allow Lighthouse to offer clients broad business communication retention and e-discovery offerings.

“This is an important expansion of our products and services for financial services institutions, further differentiating us in our markets,” Lighthouse CEO Brian McManus said in a statement. Forexus' client base largely sits within the financial sector, while Lighthouse broadly serves large multinational organizations.

Chris Dahl, vice president of product development and advisory services at Lighthouse, told LTN that the Forexus software will be moved into the Lighthouse product suite. “We plan to integrate Forexus software exclusively into Lighthouse's processing and review
technologies and workflows. We will work with business partners that were licensing the
software from Forexus to transition them in an orderly way from the Forexus platform,” he said.

The acquisition is the latest in a string of major market moves from Lighthouse, which seems intent on proving itself to be a major market player in the midst of broader e-discovery market consolidation. Lighthouse last year acquired e-discovery competitor Discovia and established two new data centers in the U.K.

Lighthouse Advisory Services will adopt Forexus' consulting arm to advise clients on their information governance and compliance technology.

Forexus's chat technology specializes in documenting exact history and chronology of chat records. The company's system allows for chat data to be deduplicated, formatted as a document and loaded into document review platforms, a strategy aimed at limiting the review population.

“Chat e-discovery and its broad-scale use in the financial services sector was one of the primary
benefits of the acquisition,” Dahl told LTN. “Perhaps more importantly, the software has wide application to messaging and collaboration platforms used by many for corporate communications.”

Dahl said that Lighthouse plans to adopt and broaden Forexus' chat capabilities for use in verticals outside the financial space.

Chat record retention has become a far more complex process over the past few years. While business communications have historically been housed primarily in email servers, they've increasingly moved into mobile and social media venues, forcing communication retention platforms to chase business communications across various different platforms.

“It's not just email, it's not just text, it's all of it,” Mike Pagani, senior director of product marketing and chief evangelist at Smarsh, previously told LTN of the new challenges e-discovery providers face in handling chat data. “You can't wave the comprehensive flag in the e-discovery space unless you're drawing from multiple data types.”