Family Wealth Report caught up with Advent to find out more about how the business is going to function under the SS&C umbrella.

In another example of industry consolidation earlier this month, particularly in the technology sector, SS&C Technologies completed its $2.63 billion acquisition of California-headquartered Advent Software, creating a global provider of investment management software and services with over 10,000 clients.

The deal – confirmed in February 2015 – continued SS&C's acquisition-led growth strategy in the financial services software and software-enabled services industries, as demonstrated by its now 41 acquisitions to date, including DST Global Solutions in 2014.

With Advent – which works with over 4,300 investment management and advisory firms including hedge funds, wealth management firms and family offices – now a unit of SS&C, Family Wealth Report spoke to Dave Welling for insight into how the business will be reorganized and run going forward.

Advent is realigning its workforce into two market groups, explained Welling, who joined the firm in 2011 via its acquisition of Black Diamond (at which point Black Diamond was just a portfolio performance reporting platform).

One unit will be focused exclusively on the US advisory market, led by Welling, and the second will be centered around traditional and alternative asset management clients, overseen by Pete Hess, who heads up Advent and will continue doing so as president and chief executive. Welling said there are no changes expected to Advent's branding or logo.

“We've reorganized within Advent to focus on what our clients do,” Welling said. “Rather than organizing ourselves around products, we're positioning ourselves around clients, which reflects where we see future growth and investment opportunities.”

Around 2,500 clients will be served by Advent's advisory-focused market unit, said Welling, who until being assigned his new responsibilities ran Black Diamond. “We thought it was important to move away from a product/functional lens to one that is squarely set on the businesses our clients are in, how they're evolving and what they need, and put us in a position to draw on the unique strengths of Advent and SS&C.”

“This [SS&C] is a company with many complementary software solutions that has proven its expertise in deployment and outsourcing services,” Hess wrote in a recent blog post. “If you combine that with what we do best – software – you can see our potential to become an even more valuable leader in financial services technology.”

Reflecting Advent's innate focus on the advisory community as a whole, Black Diamond is a fast-moving business, with its client base growing by over 40 per cent each year, Welling said.

“We're making significant investments in future technology, growing from our roots as a performance reporting solution to a true wealth management platform,” he said, adding that the firm will likely double its roster of product development staff by the end of 2015.

Last month, Advent unveiled the third generation of Black Diamond - the Black Diamond wealth platform - at its 2015 AdventConnect conference in Las Vegas, NV. Black Diamond is now a full-featured wealth management platform that integrates portfolio management, reporting, client communications and rebalancing. Clients will also see improved flexibility to support the branding and reporting needs of different teams typically found at large wealth management enterprises.

Industry theme

Advent will also be helping clients using Axys or APX – two other Advent products – to evolve from operating “on the ground” to leveraging the cloud, Welling said. “We're excited to leverage SS&C's broad capabilities in hosting technology – an area that has been a struggle for Advent in the past,” he said.

The trend around software-as-a-service, or cloud-based technology, is crucial for Advent, Welling added, as “we know we're only a set of technologies that our clients are using.” As highlighted by the New York Times, underpinning the takeover of Advent by SS&C was indeed a bet that financial companies will continue to outsource certain systems to reduce costs.

The asset management sector is increasingly concentrating on managing money and spending less time on accounting and back-office operations, Welling said. “Many RIAs/wealth managers are a little smaller in scale than large asset managers, so they can be a bit more nimble and moved toward the outsourcing trend a little more quickly.”

“It's critical for us to be great at what we do, but clients also need us to mesh with all the other technologies they're using,” Welling added. (This could be in CRM, financial planning and/or aggregation technology, for example.) We are investing in those areas, and not just with solutions we're building, but through partnerships with other technology firms that are great at those things. Our clients need a 'Best Buy' - they don't want to go different vendors for different things. At the end of the day, we have clients depending on us for mission-critical technology and service – so we have to execute.”

SS&C “not done” with acquisitions

As mentioned above, Advent is the 41st firm that SS&C has acquired – and the company “is not done,” Welling continued.

“We [Advent] are definitely looking at acquisitions and at the prospects of partnering. There will be a shift from the way Advent has been operating for the last three or four years; the firm hasn't made an acquisition since its mid-2011 purchase of Black Diamond, for example, so we expect that to pick up.”

Welling noted that the kinds of changes brought about by acquisitions of any kind often raise questions and concerns among clients about the road ahead. He acknowledged that “we've got work to do, but that's why we're excited to have the deal closed – so we can transition out of the planning phase and start the doing.”

“We're trying to communicate as clearly as we can to clients about what this means for them, based on what business they're in,” Welling said.

As SS&C isn't as known in the wealth management or advisor community as is Advent (which has over 30 years of experience in the sector), Welling emphasized that both firms are “very committed” to the advisor market and will be making big investments not just in Black Diamond but across the board. “It's very much part of our core strategy,” he said.