SS&C GlobeOp’s Ken Fullerton sits down with Jenna Lomax to discuss the launch of the company’s GoCentral platform and why it has never been more important to streamline the processes around NAV generation
SS&C Technologies Holdings has launched its GoCentral platform in an effort to optimise SS&C’s fund administration offering. How will GoCentral achieve SS&C’s desired optimisation?
We look at this initiative through two lenses: leveraging various artificial intelligence concepts, such as machine learning and big data analytics, and focusing on business process reengineering (BPR). This two-pronged approach enables us to quickly identify operational exceptions and anomalies and understand how they were handled previously.
We look at elements such as trade processing errors or corporate actions and pricing deviations, among other areas.
These efforts mean the net asset value (NAV) production process becomes more efficient and transparent to the client. As clients have firmly intertwined with the NAV production process, outcomes are tremendously impactful and beneficial to clients and to us.
As you have mentioned, the intelligent web platform leverages BPR. How does it do this and what benefits does this introduce to fund administrators?
From the client’s perspective, there tends to be scope creep across various processes due to changing client and investor requirements.
Therefore, before we embarked on the GoCentral project, we did not want to assume that all the steps we were performing were critical and essential to strike the NAV.
Therefore, we analysed the various processes going into the NAV production to determine those required and whether we could automate them.
Then, after much research, we looked to execute specific processes essential to the ultimate goal of producing NAVs and automating them — resulting in an efficient, timely, transparent solution available to SS&C and our clients.
Why is it so important to streamline the NAV process for fund administrators?
As an administrator, we cover many facets of our client’s operations, but ultimately producing the NAV represents a culmination of many other activities throughout the month — everything from capital activity to valuations, corporate action processing and asset servicing.
We want to make sure we are the team to deliver the most accurate and timely NAV products to our clients and provide the utmost visibility and transparency. We recognise that clients are under continual pressure from investors for more timeliness, transparency, and data. The GoCentral platform ultimately delivers the visibility and clarity they need.
Will the increased transparency available through leveraging the GoCentral platform ease the regulatory burdens for fund administrators and alternative asset manager clients?
Ultimately, if we can produce the NAV quicker, other downstream deliverables can commence sooner, one of those being regulatory filings. Also, we will be able to deploy a lot of these technology solutions to many, if not all, of the regulatory compliance services we perform on behalf of our clients.
The benefits of the GoCentral platform offering the ability to review historical patterns and trends quickly means the asset manager can react or respond with a decision based on this information, and this method can also be applied to many other components or businesses — regulatory systems being one example.
SS&C also has a strong presence in the data and treasury management spaces. What other developments has SS&C been working on in these two areas?
We have another strategic initiative we are working on and have already deployed to benefit the operational processes around natural language processing. First, it enables us to look at both structured and unstructured data received in disparate formats and from various sources. Then, it interprets and translates that data into easily consumed performance processes.
We receive thousands of notices from various administration banks in the loan administration space, all in different formats. The platform enables us to extract the most salient and pertinent information to process it. As a result, it has already created tremendous efficiencies within the loan processing group.
Additionally, we are substantially expanding our treasury management capabilities with SS&C Treasury Management. We feel this is an area our clients are looking to take advantage of in terms of optimising their cash balances, optimising returns or reducing what they are paying for financing positions.
We see clear operational benefits in terms of efficiency risks and risk mitigation for SS&C in expanding these two areas and tangible benefits for our clients.
What will SS&C’s main priorities be for the remainder of the year, aside from developing the GoCentral platform?
What is paramount to us is leveraging the technology we have available, underpinned by the personnel and talent on our team to provide quality client service. We want to ensure our clients’ experience with SS&C is enriched and our clients are delighted — that is what it is all about.
