Buy-Side Technology Awards: Best Fund Administrator─SEI

Fund administrators offer a complex array of services that include data storage and retrieval, accounting services, front-, middle- and back-office solutions, and investor servicing. It's a challenging job, and it's a job that Buy-Side Technology's judging panel found SEI to do the best, handing the vendor its third win in four years.

During a time of constricting budgets, SEI invested more than $100 million in new technology and research and development in 2011─a 15 percent increase from 2009─and has continued its investment over the last 12 months. This effort has led to enhancements to its Manager and Investor Dashboards. In an effort to gain efficiency, for its Manager Dashboard, SEI shaved three hours off its nightly load process and has dramatically reduced the time it takes large files to load from 40 minutes to less than two minutes. As a result, it can now deliver more data in a shorter timeframe, allowing fund managers to have more timely and accurate data at their fingertips prior to the next day's open.

Because SEI takes an open-architecture approach to evaluating systems, it has a wide array of product offerings and takes in more than 30 sources of data-front-to-back-that it normalizes, aggregates, and loads for clients on a daily basis. For systematic and high-frequency traders, SEI processes between 80,000 and 120,000 trades a day, and offers a service to certain clients that allows them to collect trade and other information from up to 20 counterparties a day. Hedge funds are being forced to do more with less. SEI has clearly recognized this and has invested heavily to pick up the slack.