For those of you who I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting, my name is Frank Maltais, and I am the Regional Director for APAC at SS&C Eze. After more than 20 years in the financial and investment technology industry, I came to SS&C Eze in April of last year — an interesting time for the company and the world. APAC was hit first and hard by COVID-19, and we remained in lockdown for several months in an attempt to contain the outbreak while following strict measures, including travel bans, social-distancing rules, and foreign worker restrictions.
Amidst the unusual market volatility and uncertainty, SS&C Eze recognized its 25th anniversary. We welcomed more than 200 new asset managers onto our platforms, including hedge funds, long-only, and institutional funds. We remained steadfast in our goal to continue providing the modern investment management solutions and exceptional expertise asset managers need to handle uncertainty and position themselves for future growth.
Suffice to say, my first year at the company was an eventful one. Having recently celebrated my 1-year “Eze-iversary,” I wanted to take some time to reflect on the growth and innovation I have witnessed in the past 12 months.
In APAC, our client base continues to grow with more than 240 firms in the region optimizing their operations on an SS&C Eze platform; 185 of these firms are utilizing our flagship platform, Eze Investment Suite, to grow their business.
Since the launch of Eze Eclipse in APAC two years ago, we have seen rapid adoption in the region, totaling 55 firms across Singapore, Australia, China, Hong Kong, and Japan, including seven of the region’s top hedge funds. In the past year alone, we doubled our APAC client base. This growth is due in part to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s selection of SS&C Eze as a Qualified Outsourcing Provider and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS)’s Digital Acceleration Program (DAG), which qualifies SS&C Eze as an approved vendor for Eze Eclipse.
Globally, SS&C Eze brought 65 new clients live on the platform last year, onboarding 1-2 firms per week on average since the start of the pandemic, despite operating in a remote environment. So far this year, we’re nearing 200 clients operating on Eze Eclipse globally and have not lost any clients to our competitors to date.
We invest over $40m into our platforms annually, ensuring that our clients always have the latest technology and tools that they need to stay ahead of the competition. In 2021, we’ve already delivered four product updates for Eze Investment Suite in partnership with our clients and continue to roll out new features weekly in Eze Eclipse.
Over the past year, for Eze Investment Suite users, we expanded automated trading, improved ESG data integration, and rolled out financial reporting updates. We continued to bolster fixed income coverage with our new Repo trade ticket and Deal Manager. Fortlake Asset Management, an Australian start-up, is just one of the nearly 50% of Eze OMS clients utilizing the platform’s enhanced functionality to manage and trade fixed income and OTC instruments.
In Eze Eclipse, we worked to bring clients robust modeling and analytics tools, simplified batch ordering, enhanced reconciliation workflows, improved Locate Hub Request blade, and welcomed the new Edit Commission Splits blade and Broker Splits functionality, along with many other operational enhancements to help maximize their efficiencies.
Over the past year, we also unveiled a new app for Android and iOS that provides secure, mobile access to SS&C Eze applications on-the-go. The next-generation Eze mobile app is powered by Eze Eclipse and leverages Eclipse’s cloud-native microservice architecture to enable faster innovation with continuous updates in a highly scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure.
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As we consistently invest in our products, they have remained best-in-class among industry competitors, earning us more than 20 awards across numerous categories last year and 5 more already this year, including Best OMS at the WatersTechnology Asia Awards for the second year in a row for Eze OMS’s seamless front-office integration and cross-functional workflows.
In addition to Best OMS, we also collected Cloud Solution Provider of the Year for Eze Eclipse at the Asia Risk Awards 2020, for the all-in-one, cloud-native investment solution’s ability to streamline and simplify workflows, and Best PMA at the HFM Asia Service Awards 2020 for Eze Portfolio Management and Accounting’s flexible reporting tools for both historical and real-time views of data. These awards not only recognize SS&C Eze’s innovative development techniques and advanced operating model’s ability to deliver valuable products and services to our clients but also demonstrate our commitment to ensuring our clients are equipped with the flexible, accessible, and mobile tools they need to remain operational and efficient regardless of the circumstances.
Despite the challenges of last year, I am incredibly proud to be part of a team that came together from around the globe to support one another and our clients, all while continuing to innovate and drive the business forward. Over the past year, we were fortunate to welcome firms like Blue Creek, a Hong Kong long/short equity fund manager onto our all-in-one, easy-to-use Eze Eclipse solution, and we look forward to continuing to expand in the Chinese market with firms like CSOP, one of the largest offshore Chinese asset managers, who chose Eze Investment Suite to help grow their business and provide global investors better exposure to China's indexes. As we expand our footprint in the region, we will continue to work closely with our local partners, like the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG), and, of course, our clients.
As we continue to adjust to a new normal post-vaccine, we will undoubtedly face new challenges and uncertainties. I am confident that our SS&C Eze APAC team, as well as the rest of SS&C Eze, is up for the challenge. As always, we are grateful for your continued support and look forward to growing our partnership throughout the rest of this year and beyond.
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