Waters Rankings 2014: Best Network Provider — SunGard

The distinction goes a long way toward explaining SunGard’s continued dominance in this space and its win for the firm’s SunGard Global Network (SGN), which again cast an impressively wide net this year by pulling new asset classes, geographies, and perhaps most impressively, other third-party providers into its connected ranks—along with the most votes from Waters’ readers for this year’s best network provider.

SGN is the vendor giant’s most obvious proof that—along with a small handful of other providers—financial technology still truly runs on, or perhaps over, SunGard. Whereas a new client win or expanded relationship is exhilarating for any technology provider, clients of SGN are increasingly the providers, themselves—since its win in the same category last year, those range from fixed-income alternative trading system DelphX, to Swift, a Belgium-based provider of secure financial messaging services, and fellow 2014 Waters Rankings winner, Eze Castle Integration (see page 64).

Of course, in no way does this mean SGN has strayed from what it does best, which—often taken in concert with a collection of other SunGard products and services—is to help brokerages, intermediaries, and other market players across the world connect to buy-side participants and rise to new challenges quickly. In just two examples, Credit Suisse has worked with the provider in the past year to improve its iCPPI (constant proportion portfolio insurance) hedging platform for insurers, while ETRE Financial’s recently launched, exchange-traded real-estate platform also runs on the network, the first of its kind.

The vendor’s additional spin-offs centered around SGN connectivity, including SGN Securities—which won a Sell-Side Technology Award earlier this year—as well as solutions for funds and short-term cash management, have only added to the breadth of the network. Together, they form a complete offering whose utility is near impossible to match, let alone trump.