Buy-Side Technology Awards 2016: Best Portfolio Accounting Platform—SS&C Advent

SS&C Advent’s prior form in the BST Awards makes it no surprise to see the platform triumph once again in this category, following another successful showing in this year’s Waters Rankings awards for its Geneva platform. Perhaps the secret of its enduring success is the post-merger presence of the Advent team that built the platform, or the continued efforts to keep both the solution ahead of the competition and its users in compliance with changing regulatory requirements.

The platform extends beyond front-office decision-support and portfolio management to middle-office automation, through trade capture and reconciliation. Built to support even the most complex global investment strategies and fund structures, it offers comprehensive instrument coverage, full financial general ledger, and industry-standard integration tools. Its open architecture also provides integration with external systems, market data providers and counterparties, maintaining an extensive list of productized connectivity to these sources.

Over the last year as part of the vendor’s biannual upgrade schedule, Geneva has focused on five key areas of improvement: international expansion, with extended market coverage for growing markets such as Brazil, Chile, South Africa and the Middle East; investment coverage improvements for derivatives to support numerous International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) terms; industry convergence, addressing a growing demand for more standard and bespoke alternatives products to a broad investor base; usability, through streamlined workflows with features including expense accruals for group portfolios, settlement date on transfer transactions, and automated mark-to-market transactions; and scalability, with the introduction of the real-time Enterprise Information Store, which provides a new method and greater flexibility for reporting on Geneva data.

In addition to planned enhancements such as easier workflows and improved flexibility in pricing of forward FX contracts, and improved internal rate of return (IRR) and time-weighted return (TWR) reporting, is the upcoming Exception & Task Management solution, aimed at providing more transparency and oversight of a firm’s daily processing. 

SS&C Advent’s prior form in the BST Awards makes it no surprise to see the platform triumph once again in this category, following another successful showing in this year’s Waters Rankings awards for its Geneva platform.