BST Awards 2018: Best Integrated Front-Office Platform—SS&C Eze

From a buy-side perspective, the front office has traditionally received the lion’s share of technology spend. And for good reason: the front office is where asset managers’ returns emanate from, which means the underlying technology is crucial to the overall health of the firm. SS&C Eze (formerly Eze Software) has followed up last year’s win in this category by winning again at this year’s Buy-Side Technology Awards. 

According to Andrew Pheifer, director of product management at SS&C Eze, it is one of the only companies in the industry that integrates an execution management system (EMS) and order management system (OMS) under one roof. “You might be able to take an order in the OMS, and send it to be fixed in the EMS, and then execute that order out of the EMS,” he says. “But what you are lacking is bi-directionality in messaging and communication where both systems are synchronized with one another so that if an order change needs to happen, you are not swiveling back to another platform in order for that to happen—you can make that adjustment [once] and it is reflected in both systems.”  

By building application programming interfaces (APIs) to create the platform and stitch the products together, SS&C Eze has been able to offer a much more streamlined workflow, looking under the hood at the code on both sides to create the optimal architecture, according to Pheifer. “If you have two different vendors doing this, I can tell you that they are certainly not taking the same approach where they are 100 percent transparent with their code,” he says. “Typically, with those types of integration, you are going to have a master company and a child company. And even if it is wrong, the master is going to tell the child what to get done. That is never good for long-term ‘retainability’ of code. Because we are one company, we can all release new functionality on the same date.” 

There are several hundred buy-side clients currently using both SS&C Eze’s EMS and OMS offerings, while those that are taking advantage of the APIs that sit between the systems number more than 50. 

In July this year, Eze Software was acquired by investment and financial software provider SS&C Technologies for $1.45 billion. Pheifer sees the new corporate identity as an opportunity to leverage Eze’s EMS and OMS work in order to complement other products in SS&C’s portfolio. He envisions extending it as a front-office offering for a much larger client base that have their fund administration services run through SS&C.