Buy-Side Technology Awards 2017: Best Fund Administrator—SEI

When it comes to fund administration, publicly-owned global financial services firm, SEI, has been blazing a trail for the best part of 50 years, all the way back to when it was founded in 1968. Over the decades, Oaks, PA-based SEI has continued to reinvent itself and its services, keeping up with the technological and financial trends of the global investment management industry, by expanding, digitizing and automating its front-to-back offering supporting the entire fund administration process.

The transparency and control it provides its clients have been rewarded many times in the past—it has won this category in the Buy-Side Technology Awards every year since 2010, when GlobeOp was in the winners’ circle. Much of SEI’s success is down to the way the firm manages and rebrands its admin offering, adding a significant number of buy-side market participants every year.

What the firm has achieved is the development of streamlined services for the middle and back offices, including investor fulfillment and trade processing via its SEI Trade platform, where data flows can serve the front office and enhance the investor’s experience quickly and efficiently. The solution was produced for and with the cooperation of client-firm CTOs, while its ultimate goal is to provide a necessary tool not only for CFOs and administrative departments, but also to spread it throughout the organization.

A big part of SEI’s administrating solution is taking inconsistent pdf-oriented subscription processing for investors to get into a hedge fund and digitizing it in order to aggregate the available data. That allows it to streamline and shrink the amount of time it takes to complete that process with accurate information.

Over the last twelve months, SEI has been working on upgrading its service, automating the onboarding process for investors. Jim Warren head of solutions, strategy and development at

SEI’s Investment Manager Services division, says that the firm has been making additional enhancements to its dashboard, changing the way investors access their information. “We are really focused on data analytics,” he says. “That’s everything from enhancing our data model and the data we aggregate to applying calculations and methodologies in order to get more information out.”

He adds that while the firm is looking into applying distributed-ledger technology into its toolbox, for the time being at least, the advancement of its calculation methodology remains the critical factor for improving SEI’s services. “This will secure better workflow and will strengthen our existing administrative services,” says Warren. 

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• Topics
• Analytics
• SEI
• Awards & Rankings
• Buy-Side Technology Awards
• Back office
• Europe
• Front office