By Kelly Lynch
Last week Ignites reported on an industry survey conducted by Broadridge. The article’s title perfectly captures the key idea: “‘Old Pipes’ Can’t Support New Demands, Leaving Shops in a Lurch.” From the article:
- “Some 41% of the 500 financial services technology and operations leaders surveyed said their tech strategies aren't evolving quickly enough, and 46% said that legacy systems are holding them back.”
- “The issue is widespread in asset management, analysts said, as investors demand products and services that their old technology can't handle.”
- “[I]t's becoming increasingly difficult to find staffers who know how to work with the antiquated tech, consultants said”
If you haven’t yet seen the Broadridge report itself, I encourage you to read it: [link]
Here, I’d like to share a few reflections from our perspective working with clients at Envision.
Often, a firm’s initial inquiry about our investor recordkeeping platform (whether for transfer agency accounting or brokerage subaccounting) is because their an existing platform is building on top of an aging foundation that can’t handle the complexities of popular vehicles such as interval funds or has limited capability when it comes to integration with other systems. In those conversations, prospective clients are often relieved to hear:
- We can support a wide range of investment products—at scale—from a common record keeping platform eliminating the need to add new systems when supporting additional vehicles such as interval funds, tender-offer funds, BDCs and others. The wrapper doesn’t matter!
- Our system emphasizes APIs to facilitate integration and make real time data exchange easy.
- Our clients don’t need “surround systems” to deliver back-office efficiencies and investor services because everything is integrated into the core recordkeeping system in real time.
- Our suite of integrated applications is built upon proven industry standards such as Windows and Microsoft SQL server expanding the implementation options with tools that are popular with today’s application developers.
- We help clients deliver a tailored, modern investor experience to their staff and their customers.
The bottom line in these conversations with firms new to Envision is we can make their lives tremendously easier—by being able to say “yes” to new products and not getting bogged down by “plumbing problems.”