Buy-Side Technology Awards 2016: Winners' Circle—SS&C Advent

SS&C Advent’s Geneva has enjoyed continued success in the portfolio accounting platform category in the BST Awards. What separates it from other offerings?

Robert Roley, senior vice president and co-general manager, SS&C Advent: Geneva is known globally to be a leading technology solution for real-time portfolio management, reporting, and investor accounting, and today serves over 300 clients in 28 countries, including asset managers, hedge funds, fund administrators, prime brokers, mutual funds, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Geneva provides a solution for a full spectrum of business needs, from front-office decision-support and portfolio management, to middle-office automation, through trade capture and reconciliation. Built to support even the most complex global investment strategies and fund structures, it offers comprehensive instrument coverage, full financial general ledger, and industry-standard integration tools. With flexible deployment options, from in-house installations and enhanced hosting services to fully outsourced and co-sourced models, firms can take advantage of the full functionality of Geneva in a manner that best suits their business requirements and operational needs.

What enhancements have you made to Geneva over the past 12 months?

Roley: Most of SS&C Advent’s products benefit from two major releases per year, demonstrating our commitment to reinvesting in and innovating our solutions. For example, Geneva’s mission is to excel at the support of accounting and position keeping for any instrument, within any structure and in any region. Our 2016 enhancements support five key market drivers:

International expansion—We’ve added more coverage to support Latin America and specific regional requirements, such as CISCA Fund Distributions, common in South Africa. Many of our enhancements, as they relate to expanding coverage for all regions, are geared toward enabling firms to consolidate disparate systems and minimize operational overhead and inefficiencies.

Instrument coverage—Supporting the multitude of ISDA agreements and accrual methodologies in the marketplace is a continued focus, specifically the ability to process swap resets at the end of the day, as is support for IMM dates and more accounting options for dividends paid through swaps. We are also set to finalize a multi-phase bank debt project, including several new comprehensive reports.

Blurring lines of business—We continue to support demand for wanting all assets on a single platform, delivering breadth of structures, investments and clients. In 2016 we added additional support for closed-end fund investments by enhancing several existing transactions and providing additional fund investment reports.

Usability—We have improved efficiency and streamlined workflows with numerous features such as automating mark-to-market transactions for futures, settlement date on transfers, and transfers against cash (DVP); we’ve added settlement date to stock div/split transactions and we’ve enhanced the fund allocation transfer transaction process.

Technology and scalability—Improved usability and increased transaction scalability have provided more straight-through processing and lowered the total cost of ownership. With our October 2016 release, we introduced Geneva’s real-time Enterprise Information Store, which provides a new method and greater flexibility for reporting on Geneva data. Making Geneva’s accounting even faster continues to be a focus as we refactor code and expand parallel processing where applicable.

What products/enhancements are you working on that you plan to release over the next 12 months?

Roley: The next 12 months will bring exciting enhancements to our client base as we continue to expand on our core competencies with expanded instrument coverage, improved usability and increased scalability. Some of the enrichments include easier workflow and improved flexibility in pricing of forward foreign-exchange (FX) contracts; improved internal rate of return (IRR) and time-weighted return (TWR) reporting; and the incorporation of XIRR calculations. More flexible lockdown and freeze point processing will incorporate the ability to update dividends and repo investments behind locked periods. Regulatory and market changes will continue to drive our investment with enhancements to support new delayed compensation regimes for bank debt on the horizon as well. Our focus on standardizing integration will continue as we complete integration between Geneva and SS&C Recon and expand support for Optional Paydown workflows in the WSO Data Accelerator. In 2017, we will continue to improve on scalability by implementing features to make accounting faster, to improve logging and error-handling, and to make reporting and data access easier and faster.