BST Awards 2024: Best portfolio accounting platform—SS&C Advent

Overview

SS&C Advent’s flagship accounting platforms, Advent Portfolio Exchange (APX) and Geneva, are specifically designed for buy-side firms that require high levels of operational efficiency and access to real-time data. As part of the Genesis platform—a suite of applications covering the full investment lifecycle from portfolio management and trading to analytics, accounting and reporting—clients use APX to manage various portfolios, including alternatives, multi-strategy, and industry/client mandates, while Geneva allows users to manage complex investment vehicles, multiple investment strategies, and tiered fund structures.

The solution  

APX and Geneva are best-of-breed accounting platforms designed specifically for use by buy-side firms. APX is designed to help investment managers follow regulatory and client mandates, ensuring regulatory compliance. To address investment managers’ scalability and flexibility needs, APX and its accounting engine are now part of SS&C Advent’s Genesis platform. For alternative investment managers, Geneva is designed to handle complex fund structures and support asset class and strategy diversification. To address the growth in private credit, Geneva offers new workflows and investor accounting requirements.

Secret sauce  

APX simplifies operations with centralized portfolio, relationship and prospect data. It supports compliance with Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS) and US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) mandates, assuring portfolio/fund managers and their investors that their performance is accurate and comparable. Complex investment accounting, including processing derivatives and credit instruments, is the heart of the Geneva platform, making it the portfolio management and accounting system of choice for large numbers of buy-side firms by virtue of its asset class coverage and fund structure capabilities.

Recent milestones

• To address scalability, interoperability, and flexibility, SS&C Advent added APX as the accounting engine to its Genesis platform, providing buy-side firms with a unified platform experience.
• Recent enhancements to Geneva include constructing and implementing bespoke fee structures for complex, open-ended funds with Investor Fee Builder; automating workflows to generate cash reporting for collateralized loan obligations; and adding the ability to specify non-par prices on credit and loan activities.

Future objectives

Over the next 12 months, SS&C Advent will continue to focus on its collaboration with its clients and internal teams across product groups within the firm’s wealth and investment technologies. It will continue to invest in key enhancements and innovations across modernization and scalability, mobility and accessibility, interoperability across solutions, and operational workflows.

Why they won

It’s difficult to imagine two products that are more ingrained in the global investment management landscape than SS&C Advent’s APX and Geneva. The firm has pretty much dominated this category in recent times, winning it for the past three years in succession thanks to its ever-popular accounting twins. Portfolio accounting has long been a vital function for buy-side firms to manage accurately, efficiently and transparently, the consequence of which has meant that the market is now mature and features a large number of providers and products. 

Needless to say, it is also an intensely competitive marketplace, which further underlines SS&C Advent’s achievements. Key to the firm’s success is the broadness of Geneva’s and APX’s instrument/asset class coverage, to the extent that virtually all buy-side firms are supported, regardless of their location, size and investment strategy. Add to that APX’s instrumental role as the accounting application within the firm’s Genesis platform and you begin to appreciate just how capable and versatile these two offerings are. Surely a fourth win in succession is on the cards next year.