“Spring: a lovely reminder of how beautiful change can truly be.” - Anonymous
This year’s spring season has been especially rejuvenating. I am very proud of how well our team met the moment to support the changing needs of our clients, their constituents, and the industry when faced with the unknown.
Our development teams in particular have risen to the challenge, updating our solutions to increase efficiencies, enable scale and offer deeper levels of functionality to eliminate “offline” workflows. With our 21.1 release of Advent Portfolio Exchange (APX), Moxy and Advent Rules Manager – the portfolio management/accounting, trading and compliance components of the Advent Investment Suite – our solutions are well positioned to meet the needs of 2021 and beyond.
With this year’s release, we introduced a variety of enhancements to expand integrations, broaden asset class coverage, improve system performance, and simplify users’ workflows.
Simplified and Expanded Trading, Settlements and Compliance
We continue to expand and optimize workflows for traders, trade operations and compliance professionals. With the explosion in options trading in the past year, we have introduced workflows to further facilitate covered-call strategies. This allows firms to more effectively manage their exposures via the derivative instrument with new relative target (to cover a specific portion of a long position) and net exposure (to achieve a specific net exposure across the call and underlying) trade creation strategies.
We made a number of platform enhancements in Moxy to reporting, system performance, and integration, including furthering the real-time data synchronization with APX so that trading always has the most accurate and timely portfolio, position and reference data. We bolstered FIX connectivity for equities, fixed income, and FX trading, delivered various broker algo updates, and streamlined settlement workflows for firms leveraging FIX allocations, our SSCNet, and Omgeo ITP.
In Advent Rules Manager, we rolled out support for custom, client-driven rules and also consolidated trade check results from Advent Genesis, our model management, drift monitoring, and rebalancing solution for portfolio managers. Compliance officers now have a single place to go for all trade restriction checks and approval workflows.
Accurate and Timely Operations, Performance, and Reporting
Ensuring precise and timely position, cost, and performance data for portfolios and portfolio groups has always been a cornerstone of APX. In the 21.1 release, we offer clients further capabilities for a variety of workflows including:
- Expanded private equity coverage (unitized PE funds, assignments, distribution totals with a single transaction and lifetime contributions)
- Enhanced Sleeve accounting (suspense accounts, easier custodial position and transaction reconciliations & amendments, portfolio groups & composites within composites)
- Improved handling of cost basis (automatic custodial lot replacement, inherited assets, transfer of positions)
For developers and partners, we also introduced new capabilities to programmatically interact with the data in or derived from APX with new REST APIs for market, reference, and accounting data. Additionally, the market and reference data APIs allow firms to write this information back to APX significantly faster than with previous methods. Firms now have faster, more programmatic ways to load pricing and security master information and extract holdings, performance, and gain/loss data.
Lastly, with the 21.1 release we’re proud to announce the completion of our APX NextGen user interface. APX NextGen provides faster and more intuitive access to critical portfolio data, with a more modern look, lighter footprint, expanded browser support, and a host of new power user tools. The new UI improves access to APX data via Google Chrome. Moreover, firms using APX, Moxy, Rules Manager, and Genesis will now see a much more consistent user experience across the full suite.
With the turn in the season, now is a perfect time to take a look at the growth in our offerings. As always, client feedback is the primary driver of our product roadmap priorities across SS&C’s Advent Investment Suite. We are constantly reinvesting in solution improvements and delivering them on a consistent schedule. Our goal is to continue to deliver modern front to back office software, data and services tailored to the needs of investment managers to produce efficiencies, drive scale, and enhance the overall client experience.
For more information, visit our Advent Investment Suite solutions page.
