Buy-Side Technology Awards: Best Fund Administrator—SEI

In an ever-changing regulatory environment, buy-side firms are leaning as heavily as ever on their fund administrators. SEI Investment Management has shown an understanding of this and has invested more than $100 million in new technology and research and development over the last year.

Included in this overhaul has been a revamping of its Manager Dashboard, a web-based solution that provides an aggregated view of a firm’s data across asset classes from the fund or portfolio level down to individual investments. SEI has added user-defined data tagging so that clients can map their own data points for additional analysis. It also integrated its data to clients’ OMSs and trading systems in an effort to make it a more dominant front-office platform.

“We’ve made a number of upgrades, many of which involve enhancing our middle-office capabilities, such as providing enhanced pricing validation, post-trade compliance, collateral management and so on,” says SEI’s Phil Masterson. “We’ve also enhanced our Dashboard reporting tools, and increasingly, they are serving as our clients’ front-office system. In fact, a vice president at a client firm told his executive committee how powerful our Dashboard is, demonstrating that he didn’t need as much of an IT budget.”

In addition, SEI has integrated Advent Geneva’s portfolio accounting system with SunGard’s InvesTier and InvesTran fund accounting systems so that the systems are now talking to each other, an important development as it helps to lessen hedge funds’ dependence on Microsoft Excel by eliminating manual processes. As a result of these overhauls, the firm has added nearly 50 new clients this year.

Masterson says SEI is looking to expand its presence in the high-frequency trading community in 2012. He says the company currently processes 80,000 to 90,000 trades per day for its larger systematic clients, with peaks in the range of 120,000. In order to manage increased trade volumes, the firm will continue to invest in automation, workflows and controls that will, “allow our clients to achieve these volumes in a controlled environment with reduced business risk,” Masterson says. —AM