BST Awards 2018: Best Outsourcing Provider to the Buy Side—SS&C Advent

Coming off its win in this category last year, SS&C Advent has once again been voted the best outsourcing provider to the buy side in the BST Awards, thanks to its Advent suite of products and services. The past 12 months have delivered significant growth for parent company SS&C Technologies, especially in the wake of its acquisition of Eze Software, which closed in October this year. 

Al Castillo, senior director at SS&C Advent, says the Advent platform has found much success in offering flexible options for buy-side firms that may be reluctant to move to the cloud. “One of the things that makes us stand out is our experience, having been around for more than 20 years,” he says. “We also take advantage of technology and infrastructure upgrades and our ability to host and cloud-deliver, so we’re uniquely positioned in the market. We had some success last year with flexible offerings. Despite more people becoming more comfortable with outsourcing, we are willing to move as fast or as slow as our clients need.”

SS&C upgraded its infrastructure over the past year to provide more flexible delivery options and transparency for its clients. Castillo says SS&C released a new status page last year that generates client alerts if there’s a problem with the system. The alerts used to be limited to internal monitors, but were extended to clients to keep them up to date. Earlier this year, SS&C also released Advent Lumis, which captures and shares exception events with clients as part of an effort to provide more information around outsourcing workflows. The firm also improved its disaster recovery policies, according to Castillo. 

Castillo says the acquisition of Eze Software provides opportunities for new enhancements to the platform, including additional integration with Eze’s many buy-side offerings. “With the close of the acquisition, we can host the Eze solution—which we hosted independently before—by 2019,” he says. “Clients that use the different platforms will no longer have to move their data through different cloud infrastructures, but rather work with one vendor, so their information is passed and accessed easily.”

While there are no planned upgrades to the platform as yet, Castillo notes that work will continue around governance projects to increase transparency to clients, a trend permeating much of the industry. SS&C is also investing in a single portal solution so that clients no longer have to receive multiple reports or log into different sites. 

One of the biggest projects SS&C is undertaking, however, is exploring potential solutions to deploy its services via public clouds. Castillo says clients, while still largely hesitant to use public clouds, have nonetheless expressed interest in using these infrastructures.