SS&C initiates buy-side migration to front-to-back Aloha platform

SS&C Technologies has started the process of moving asset management and wealth management clients to its recently introduced front-to-back platform, SS&C Aloha.   

Christy Bremner, senior vice president and general manager at the Connecticut-based vendor says some buy-side clients are already in the process of moving over to the solution, while others are still considering timings and what the migration entails.

“We started to softly talk to customers about it last fall and began to engage with them around our value proposition, what it would mean for them, and get some early conversations going. Before that, there are some strategic customers that we have been talking to for at least over a year,” Bremner says.

In June of this year, the firm did a soft launch for SS&C Aloha, so named because Hawaii is the geographic midpoint between the mainland US and Australia developers that built the technology. Among the functions available on the platform are accounting, performance, reconciliation, data management, net asset value, portfolio management, and trading.

Some clients are already using one or more existing tools from SS&C Technologies, such as its accounting or reconciliation solutions. “This particular opportunity that we have with Aloha depends on where the customers are at today. If they are using an accounting system of ours, it would be a next-generation move for them to move to Aloha. If they’re just using a client reporting platform of ours, it would be an extension of what we do for them today,” Bremner says. 

Customers don’t need to adopt all the functions available on the platform. “It’s a modular system, so they can start with wherever might have the most pain or interest and they can evolve over time,” she says. 

SS&C has grown by acquisition, and each acquired firm brings with it its own technology and user interface. Bremner says integrating these capabilities is made easier through the use of Aloha as they are consolidated behind a single user interface.  

“[The consolidated Aloha platform] supports the needs of each type of person—we call them personas—and what they need to do in their daily job,” she says.   

She says the platform’s single data model helps firms avoid having to maintain data in two different places. For example, a user leveraging the accounting and performance functions within SS&C Aloha can retrieve data from a unified database. 

“If I am going to generate performance returns, I am going to go to the same place to get my positions holdings and transaction data as I would if I was going to do accounting. You do not need to replicate that data and have it in two different systems so they can perform their individual functions, and move data in between them,” Bremner says.

Alex Wolcough, founder and CEO at consultancy GreenBirch Group, says smaller funds are looking for a “vanilla, all-in-one solution” to simplify IT management. These funds want to spend more money on their investment decision-making, rather than on the IT used to support day-to-day processes. 

Wolcough says the idea of being able to “collapse” the investment, trading, and settlement workflow into one solution has been attractive for some time now and has been offered by vendors, like Bloomberg, for many years. Other providers of modular front-to-back solutions include SimCorp Dimension and State Street Alpha. 

“Bloomberg uses Aim as their order management system, and then they have various execution management systems. EMSX for equities execution management, and TSOX for fixed-income and derivatives execution management. They all sit on the same platform; it’s modular but it has to be done the Bloomberg way,” Wolcough says. 

He says it’s a “fairly vanilla and Bloomberg-style way of doing things” and says there is room for competition from other providers that can introduce more functionality into their all-in-one platforms. 

He says if a buy-side firm wants to migrate from using many different tools to an all-in-one system, it needs to make sure the platform can be adapted to fit all business needs, potentially across different asset classes. For instance, a platform built to trade equities might not work for trading fixed income.  

Wolcough says firms have a choice between taking a “big bang” approach or parallel running the platform with their older systems. Very small firms may choose to migrate everything at once because their businesses are relatively straightforward, but medium-sized firms will migrate on a module-to-module basis.

“You may start with the trading side that feeds into your old accounting system until you are happy that the trading is working well. And then you might move across to your accounting system and parallel run that for a while, and then switch off your old system once you are satisfied that the old accounting system comes up with the same figures as the new accounting system,” Wolcough says. 

Firms moving from many different tools to an all-in-one system will also have to look at the various contractual agreements for each product, Wolcough says, which are likely to renew at different times.    

Bremner says each client has its own unique challenges. She says when customers decide on a change of system it is for one of two reasons: they are looking to resolve a problem or require new capabilities they don’t currently have. 

“I think when anybody embarks on a change like that, it’s an effort for the organization to find the time on top of their day job. What we do to try to help them is provide a lot of complementary services to their team to help them make the transition and migration, and get the system up and running in such a way that we can bear a lot of that load for them so that they can continue to focus on what they need to do on a day-to-day basis and run their business,” Bremner says.