BST Awards 2022: Best outsourcing provider to the buy side—State Street Bank and Trust

Overview

State Street offers services ranging from infrastructure hosting to fully managed accounting services around the PAM for Investments (PFI) platform, which delivers an investment and accounting book of record engine to consolidate recordkeeping for a range of traditional and emerging asset classes within configurable portfolio structures to meet the needs of asset managers, asset owners and insurers. Data ingestion and extraction services deliver investment accounting data for analytics, ledger and financial reporting needs.

What problem does it address?  

PAM provides a user interface with simple views and tools for operations management, exceptions handling and near-real-time data reporting, making complex accounting processes easier for clients to manage. Out-of-the box reporting simplifies regulatory filings and data needs for general ledger. The platform has multiple service offerings―a software as-a-service (SaaS) model where State Street manages all infrastructure, a fully managed service or a hybrid SaaS model with layered services.

Secret sauce 

The PFI platform features broad asset class coverage, the ability to meet regulatory reporting and compliance requirements across global jurisdictions, cash and security processing with automated workflows, data provision in near real time, access to reports, and multi-basis accounting methodologies. The service is part of State Street Alpha, a front-to-back asset serving platform for institutional and wealth management firms.

Recent milestones

• Asset coverage expansion for mortgages, limited partnerships, bank loans and derivatives
• Annual and quarterly updates for US insurance regulatory/vendor updates, alternative, reference rate enhancements, and the addition of Bermuda Monetary Authority reporting
• Integration with State Street Alpha

Future objectives 

• Asset expansion enhancements for alternative investments and annual/quarterly regulatory updates
• State Street Alpha data delivery via the Snowflake cloud platform to provide near-real-time reporting and outbound data delivery feeds
• State Street Alpha integration with front-office trading platforms to complete near-real-time front-to-back integration 
• Improve operations and exceptions resolution with workflow, microservices and AI/ML technologies

Why they won 

State Street wins its first ever category in the Buy-Side Technology Awards, thanks to its PFI platform that provides buy-side firms with a range of accounting tools and services. That support is set to broaden as the firm looks to expand PFI’s asset class coverage to include alternatives, while its integration with State Street Alpha―the firm’s front-to-back-office platform designed to automate manual processes and deliver real-time data such as portfolio holdings and investable cash on a single platform―makes its value proposition to the buy side that much more compelling.