By unifying data and workflows, SS&C helps investment managers cut complexity, reduce risk, and stay ahead in a changing market. SS&C’s Boris Bykhovsky shares the strategic vision for Genesis and explores how breaking down data silos is transforming operations.
(Investment managers are under pressure like never before. Rising client expectations, tighter regulations, and a flood of new data are straining traditional operating models. Too often, firms are left with fragmented systems, manual workarounds, and escalating costs that slow growth and limit agility. We spoke with Boris Bykhovsky, managing director of investment management solutions at SS&C Advent, to learn how Genesis is helping managers simplify operations, unlock data-driven decision-making, and position their businesses for long-term success.)
Q: What are some of the market challenges currently facing investment managers?
A: Investment managers face a range of headwinds impacting efficiency, scalability, and the ability to adapt to dynamic market conditions. While many of these challenges have been present for some time, in recent years, they’ve only been amplified by increased data availability and growing client and regulatory expectations.
For starters, access to real-time position, cash, and trading information has become almost table stakes, regardless of the time of day or where they are at that point in time. Unfortunately, these demands are often met with fragmented and inconsistent views of necessary information, hindering decision-making and analysis. This fragmentation is only compounded by reliance on outdated technology with extensive, often bespoke, integrations between systems. These integrations are not only expensive to build and maintain but also require manual workarounds, further inhibiting transparency and growth. As a leading provider of technology for over four decades, we know this all too well.
Even though firms are aware of these operational issues, the thought of significant technological transformation triggers apprehension and fear of disruption to existing operations, data migration challenges, and the overall risk of adoption.
But here’s the thing: financial markets are constantly changing due to regulations, emerging asset classes, and shifts in investor expectations. The firms that do not adopt technology that can adapt to these evolving dynamics will fall behind.
Q: Historically, how has the fintech industry worked to address these challenges?
A: Firms historically have had to choose between best-of-breed solutions from different providers, requiring cumbersome integrations or settling for less comprehensive, bundled offerings. This often led to manual workarounds and fragmented data issues, hindering scalability and the potential for a unified operational view. Additionally, our industry has gone through many of the same integration evolutions as other industries. From point-to-point integrations leveraging various middleware to more dynamic services-oriented architecture allowing applications to interoperate, the vendors in our space have consistently offered ways to improve data availability. This evolution has made it easier for firms to manage their tech stack. However, in many cases, these solutions were really just focused on sharing data rather than the normalization of data necessary to support workflows like portfolio management, trading, and reconciliation across systems.
What we are seeing now is a demand, not just for integration of solutions, but for data normalization across solutions and the need to do it quickly, accurately, and cost-effectively.
Q: SS&C Advent has developed a platform to address these challenges. Can you tell us about it?
A: Sure. With our understanding of the industry’s historical challenges and future needs, we introduced Genesis — our vision of a truly connected investment management enterprise.
What really sets Genesis apart is its comprehensive and deeply integrated approach, moving beyond the traditional “front-to-back” to deliver something fresh and new.
Our strategy for building Genesis involved a fundamental realignment, bringing together the most expansive set of best-of-breed capabilities across the investment lifecycle – portfolio management, trading, compliance, analytics, accounting and reporting – onto a unified architecture. This was not simply an integration exercise. Internally, we aligned roadmaps and reallocated resources to increase our development investment and deliver deeper solutions faster.
This approach, backed by SS&C Advent’s extensive knowledge from decades of serving the investment management industry, allows us to continue making substantial investments in growing existing solutions while simultaneously driving innovation.
Ultimately, Genesis aims to simplify and optimize the end-to-end investment and data management processes, giving users a holistic view and streamlined operations unlike anything else in the market.
Q: How does SS&C Advent’s Genesis uniquely address the market challenges you mentioned?
A: At the core of Genesis is our cloud data platform leveraging modern, open-source services for its architecture. This innovative design connects systems behind the scenes, creating a single, unified data set and source of truth. Its real-time flow of timely and comprehensive data across applications and functions breaks down data silos and centralizes core data sets such as investment and portfolio data across applications, providing a holistic view of critical information for stronger decision-making.
This unified data foundation also simplifies all those end-to-end investment and data management processes. The system streamlines operations and brings teams together through a single point of entry and operational experience, boosting collaboration across functions.
By bringing the best investment solutions together on a single data layer, Genesis reduces the need for bespoke integrations and manual workarounds, eliminating reliance on these expensive and time-consuming efforts.
For those concerned about risk and disruption during technology transformation, Genesis is designed for achievable transformation – providing firms with a modular, flexible approach, enabling firms to scale and evolve technology in the cloud at their own pace.
Q: Looking ahead, how does the Genesis approach enable firms to keep up with, or even ahead of, market challenges and trends?
A: Clean and comprehensive data sets, like those enabled by Genesis, are the foundation for easier application of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence. The combination of Genesis’s flexible modules and robust platform APIs provides the adaptability needed to respond quickly to changing market dynamics, enabling firms to align and evolve their technology across applications, investment types, strategies, and business lines to maintain a competitive edge.
The ability to connect, normalize, and act on data is becoming a defining factor for investment managers. Platforms like Genesis show how firms can reduce complexity today while laying the groundwork for future innovation.
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