Key executives at SS&C Karen Geiger and Steve Leivent take questions about the A.I. advances for Genesis and Black Diamond.
(SS&C Technologies is underscoring its full embrace of artificial intelligence (A.I.) for its financial services offerings with the announcement of a suite of solutions at its annual SS&C Deliver 2026 conference this week. SS&C is bolstering a range of solutions, including wealth management, retirement (ConnectIQ), alternatives, and asset management, through the SS&C AI Gateway governance platform. In particular, SS&C is preparing an AI-based portfolio management assistant to embed in the Genesis platform and has launched A.I. enhancements via Black Diamond AI. SS&C also unveiled SS&C Insight AI for the SS&C GlobeOp alternative fund administration suite; Sales Prep for A.I.-based prospecting and customer relationship management for asset management distribution teams; and debuted a six-part docuseries, “The Blueprint: Customer Zero,” about SS&C’s agentic A.I. transformation efforts. Steve Leivent and Karen Geiger, co-heads of SS&C Wealth & Investment Technologies, took time out of their schedules to answer questions from FTF News about the A.I. advances for Black Diamond and Genesis.)
Q: Have you experienced any resistance to A.I. from the portfolio managers that you serve?
Karen Geiger
Karen: I think every firm is eager to adopt A.I. I think they want to know how it can be done securely and safely. So, I think they’re looking for guardrails and we solve that with SS&C’s AI Gateway, which is the gateway by which any of our applications, whether that be Genesis or Black Diamond, talk to the models. So we’re able to understand what prompts are going in and it’s designed to understand how to route to models and if there’s confidential information. So I think it’s not resistance so much as wanting to understand what the governance framework is.
Q: So what is the basis for your guardrails?
Steve: What AI Gateway is designed to do is understand what is going into the toolsets and then act as a redaction capability.
If there’s necessary PII [Personally Identifiable Information] that may be surfaced and exposed to the models, it has the ability to eliminate sensitive components. This way, we’re making sure that the sensitive information that our clients entrust us with doesn’t leave our organization.
Q: I’ve been speaking with some of the clients at your event. How will the A.I. efforts help them? Are there any before and after examples, especially for the Genesis offering?
Karen: Well, we’re in beta right now with our Genesis portfolio management agent. We are looking for feedback before we move it into production within a few months.
The agent operates within the product itself, and essentially it sits side by side with the Genesis user interface. It’s a chat interface, but it can take action.
It’s basically an assistant to the portfolio manager. It can look at positions, rebalance portfolios, do tax lot harvesting, and bring up a chart and a graph. So it’s essentially making it a lot easier for a portfolio manager to accomplish what they would’ve done before through lots of clicks and going to different screens.
Portfolio managers are notoriously short on time, and it can be difficult to train on a new product. So I think this is going to make that barrier to entry really low. As we bring new functionality into the product, it’ll be really easy because they’re just continuing to interact through a chat interface.
Steve: For Black Diamond, we released two in-app capabilities called Insights and Assist.
Steve Leivent
Assist is a natural language help capability that will, over time, turn into site navigation. If you want to go and rebalance a portfolio, you can basically just go and say, ‘I want to rebalance the XYZ portfolio,’ and it will kick off the workflow.
Insights helps summarize a client relationship and the details of what’s happening there or a potential trade file, et cetera. So it’s really going and taking a look at a large source of data and giving you the highlights, primarily so that an advisor could then interact with their client and have some data at their fingertips without really even having to navigate the system. We also released an MCP server that is now available to firms that want to connect their own enterprise AI toolset.
This allows a firm that is tech-savvy and would like to enable those kinds of capabilities for their employees to basically go and query data directly out of Black Diamond and often marry it with other data sources.
So, it’d be very common for an advisor to be able to connect their Claude environment to their custodian and Black Diamond, for example, and be able to pull data about the end client, holdings, performance, even report content, and so forth.
Black Diamond AI was released literally last week, and right now I think our clients are experimenting with the set of capabilities. We did release a number of predetermined workflows that you can interact with. Things like calling a portfolio, calling on positions, getting performance data or starting a meeting prep. I think we will continue to iterate based on client feedback and how they’re using these tools.
We’ll be able to see it in the back end through the actual usage of what kind of data is being queried. That will help drive where else we invest. We always have had this philosophy that we’ll meet advisors in the tools and workflows that they already use. If you want to have an open ecosystem of a bunch of other technology providers that includes Black Diamond, we’re happy to support that.
Q: There are MCPs for key SS&C products. Can you drill down on that?
Karen: Black Diamond, Genesis, Geneva, and Eclipse are all examples of products that represent different market segments. More sophisticated clients that have their own tech teams will want access to the data for their own AI. You do that through an MCP server.
You’ll see a lot of firms saying, ‘I need to take the data from Geneva into my downstream system. I need to connect that data with data from another system.’ And so that’s where the ability to aggregate data from different sources to maybe bring in a new business intelligence layer, investment decision layer, comes in.
Q: Does that change the job of the portfolio manager and those around the portfolio manager?
Karen: I think there’s going to be more DIY. Before, they had to call up somebody in the back office or in their IT department and ask, ‘Hey, can you build me this custom deck or this custom report extract?’ And that is going to be much more at their fingertips; it’s not going to be like, ‘Oh, you want that? Okay, wait a couple days, and that engineer will get to it in a queue of things that is piled up.’ They’ll be able to get to that themselves.
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