IT firm links portfolio technologies to promote holistic advice, reporting. SunGard is out to help banks and trust companies provide better wealth-management services, especially when it comes to offering advice based on comprehensive overviews of clients' holdings and providing similarly broad investment-performance reports.

To this end, SunGard has integrated its trust accounting, portfolio management, compliance and performance reporting with Advent Software's Advent Custodial Data (ACD) platform for managing and reconciling portfolio information to help bank- and trust-company-based wealth managers attract and work more effectively with high-net-worth customers.

Differentiator

"SunGard's ability to help simplify and streamline the process of obtaining client transactions and positions is key to helping wealth managers grow client relationships," says Blaine Maxfield, COO of SunGard's wealth-management unit. "The solution can serve many types of financial institutions requiring a central hub of client information in support of householding, family offices and a wide range of reporting needs."

As market-battered private clients search for approaches to wealth management that take account of their investment, tax and general risk profiles, SunGard's new offering provides "a key differentiator for financial advisors, particularly [RIAs] and trust companies, [which] continue to rank account aggregation and data consolidation high on their list of business requirements," according to Alois Pirker, a senior analyst with the Boston-based consultancy Aite Group.

And, as unified managed accounts and other products requiring support from fairly sophisticated aggregation and reporting engines become more prevalent, "the need for data consolidation is growing as the core component for accurately representing aggregate views of clients' assets," SunGard says in a press release. "The time consuming process of manually collecting data and the cost of building and maintaining in-house data-aggregation systems has become unmanageable for firms serving higher-net-worth clients with greater volumes of held-away assets."

Using a single connection, SunGard's data aggregation service for wealth managers -- which can be integrated with SunGard's AddVantage and Global Plus trust accounting and asset management systems and its Investor'sView portfolio-management system -- transmits client-account data and "shadow posts" held away assets into SunGard's systems from multiple custodians and brokers.

Will Clemens, San Francisco-based Advent's resident expert on straight-through processing -- which boils down to handling transactions electronically instead of having to re-key data at every step -- says that ACD "eliminates the manual process of data collection" by pulling in account information from multiple custodians. This, he adds, gives SunGard "a comprehensive and functionally robust tool that will help provide consistent business processes, increased efficiency and enhanced client service."

Wayne, Pa.-based SunGard provides IT and software services to more than 25,000 firms in 70 countries. -FWR

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