SS&C Advent Targets Order Creation with Genesis Release

Rebalancing portfolios, and generating the trades that result from the exercise, is often laborious and can take upwards of days to complete. SS&C Advent says it has reduced that process to a matter of minutes with its new order-creation tool, Genesis.

“With Advent Genesis, our customers’ portfolio management staff now have the ability to quickly and easily track and execute on complex trading decisions,” says Robert Roley, general manager of SS&C Advent.

Genesis will be rolled out to users of Advent’s Moxy order management system (OMS) and was announced on September 12 at the firm’s Deliver client conference in Chicago. Users can log in to the cloud-based tool through a web browser and rebalance portfolios on the fly, adjusting on either an individual stock basis or among batches of portfolios. The tool factors in multi-asset coverage and includes pre-trade compliance rules that are integrated both with Moxy and Advent Rules Manager.

The exception-based workflow allows for fine-tuned control over what components of the portfolio generate trading ideas during a rebalance against static or dynamic models. Users can determine whether or not to include hierarchical elements of their portfolios or strategies in the rebalance—for instance, if a stock such as Apple is out of its tolerance bands, but the overall portfolio is within them, the portfolio manager may wish to continue to hold that stock regardless. The automated engine will adjust its output accordingly.

On the Fly

Duane D’Orazio, managing partner at Conestoga Capital Advisors, tells Waters that the firm’s portfolio managers also serve as general analysts and travel a lot as a result. It’s imperative that they make it as easy as possible to rebalance quickly and efficiently. 

“There may be a need, while they’re on the road, to rebalance a portfolio, and having that mobility is extremely critical,” he says. “Anything we can do to make their life easier, more efficient and more accurate, we’re going to be on that.” 

D’Orazio says the Genesis platform features tolerance bands and the ability to set basis points for individual positions as key features. Users can also “easily identify positions in the portfolio that are outside our model tolerance band, and they can see that almost instantly.”

In line with the need for mobility, the tool can be used on tablets and other such devices, although portfolio managers trying to view it on a mobile phone may run into difficulty, owing to the quantity of information involved.

“It’s a cloud-delivered solution, so if have an internet connection, you can use it,” says Daniel Eriksson, vice president of solutions at SS&C Technologies. “You can use a phone, although I wouldn’t recommend it; there’s a lot of data. But an iPad, or a tablet, for sure.”

In addition to the visibility, the speed of Genesis has proved to be attractive among its eight beta clients, which includes Conestoga. Most of the firms in the beta group have been testing the software for the best part of a year. During a live demonstration of the product at Deliver, SS&C managed to rebalance over 1,000 portfolios and generate buy and sell trades as a result of adjusting tolerance levels.

In a normal, small-sized wealth management office this might have to be done by hand, resulting in hours, if not days, of work. Genesis ran the entire process in just over 15 seconds. Similar stories come from other beta testers.

“What this tool really does is allow me to compare all of my accounts, once I’ve set up their settings and models in the beginning, to run a rebalance against all of my securities in a very minimal amount of time,” says Michael Scott, a portfolio analyst at CPS Investment Advisors, which has been testing Genesis since late 2016. “I’ve done it across 2,000 accounts and generated over 2,600 to 3,000 trades in less than 10 minutes. Before, if I wanted to run all of those allocation strategies, I wouldn’t be able to do it in a day.”