Deal roundup: T. Rowe Price is transferring retirement technology, 800 employees to a fintech company

Editor’s note: We’ve been busy building a RealLIST Connectors list and attending Baltimore Innovation Week, but the news doesn’t slow down (as it shouldn’t). Below is a look at a few recent deals announced over the last week that will impact Maryland’s innovation economy.

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T. Rowe Price is transferring retirement record-keeping technology to another company, and 800 employees could move along with it.

Through a partnership announced this month, Jacksonville-based fintech company FIS is assuming the retirement technology development and operations for the Baltimore-based investment management company.

With this agreement, T. Rowe Price said 800 T. Rowe Price operations and technology employees based out of Owings Mills and Colorado Springs, Colorado, are being offered the same roles with FIS. The positions will remain in those locations, and the transition is set for Aug. 1.

It’s not a new partnership for the companies, as they’ve worked together for 30 years. But it does expand the relationship. In a news release, T. Rowe Price CEO Bill Stromberg said the move comes “following an extensive strategic review of the business” in which the company “concluded that expanding our partnership with FIS would best accelerate the transformation of the business and support scalable growth for the long term.”

Stromberg also spoke specifically to the employee moves.

“Providing the best experience that we can for our transitioning associates has been a top priority for everyone involved in this decision, and we are pleased that they can all move to FIS in the same roles and in the same location they are today, supporting our clients,” he said in a statement.

Going forward, T. Rowe Price will still be accountable for all record-keeping services on the retirement accounts, and will focus on “investment management, high-touch client service, and personalized participant experiences,” the company said.

“We believe we are at a point where the industry is ripe for significant change in how retirement offerings are delivered,” said Dee Sawyer, T. Rowe’s head of individual investors and retirement plan services. “Expanding our partnership with FIS will keep us ahead of new trends and position T. Rowe Price for ongoing industry leadership, enabling us to influence fintech development and inform a new way of doing business that has the potential to become a standard for the industry over the next 20 years.”

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A Boston-based cloud data access control company with a sizable presence in College Park has $90 million in fresh funding following the close of a Series D round this month.

Immuta raised the capital from a group of investors including new funders Greenspring Associates, March Capital, NGP Capital and Wipro Ventures. Existing investors participating in this round included Ten Eleven Ventures, Intel Capital, DFJ Growth, Dell Technologies Capital, Citi Ventures and Okta Ventures.

The round comes less than a year after a $40 million Series C that the company raised in 2020. It has now raised a total of $169 million in outside capital.

The company is looking to grow product research and development, as well as sales and marketing. It is also eyeing international growth in Europe and the Middle East, as well as the Asia-Pacific region.

“This new funding will accelerate innovation and [go-to-market] expansion so we can deliver our platform to more customers as we lead the charge to define the future of cloud data access control,” CEO Matthew Carroll said in a statement.

The company’s platform is used by large companies and organizations to automate cloud access control, offering a single point for control across a number of different environments where data is kept as part of a cloud infrastructure. Customers include Aon, Credit Suisse, Daimler, Flatiron, IAG, S&P Global and the U.S. Army.

Immuta was founded in 2015, and has 42 employees based out of College Park after doubling its full-time headcount overall in the last year.

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Following an announcement earlier this month that it intended to be acquired, Columbia-based SparkPost is following up by making a deal to acquire another company.

The email tech company is set to bring on London-based Taxi for Email, a tool for email design and productivity. Going forward, businesses will be able to build emails with Taxi for Email, then send them with SparkPost’s existing platform, our sister site Technical.ly DC reported.

It has been a busy few months for SparkPost, which says it delivers nearly 40% of the world’s business email. The company entered a deal to be acquired by Dutch communications platform MessageBird for $600 million in April. In March, the company also landed a $180 million funding round and named Michelle Byrd as chief people officer.