Family Office
SunGard purchases Financial Technology Integrators
ASP portfolio-management provider extends SunGard's trust-bank WM
offering. SunGard has purchased Financial Technology Integrators
(FTI), a provider of web-based portfolio-management, compliance
and performance-reporting. First and foremost, the addition of a
portfolio-management component bridges SunGard's WealthStation
front-office offering and its Charlotte trust-accounting
technology.
"FTI's portfolio-management capabilities are what [SunGard was]
after in this acquisition," says Alois Pirker, a senior analyst
with the Boston-based business consultancy Aite Group. "The
acquisition of FTI allows SunGard Wealth Management to plug a
whole in their overall application architecture."
SunGard Wealth Management's president Kevin Rafferty seems to
agree. "Incorporating FTI's offerings into SunGard's suite of
end-to-end wealth management solutions will better position us to
help our customers attract, service, manage and grow their client
relationships."
Another advantage
FTI's technology takes in financial data from multiple systems
and runs them through a portfolio-management system "to enhance
and streamline investment processes and workflows," according to
a SunGard press release.
The purchase steps up co-operation between Wayne, Pa.-based
SunGard and FTI, according to FTI's founder and COO Bill
McFadden. "FTI has worked closely with SunGard over the past few
years to integrate a number of our wealth-management and
investment solutions," says McFadden. "Joining SunGard's
wealth-management business, further integrating our products and
collaborating on innovative new solutions will help our customers
improve productivity, increase processing efficiencies and
streamline investment workflows."
In addition to the benefits of bridging the front-office and
trust-accounting pieces of wealth management, integrating FTI's
portfolio management FTI with Smartleaf's tax-optimization engine
-- which, like FTI, is an ASP offering -- gives SunGard a chance
to provide separately managed account and unified managed account
(UMA) platforms to trust companies and departments, according to
Aite's Pirker.
Cambridge, Mass.-based Smartleaf isn't a subsidiary of SunGard,
but it has provided the basis of SunGard's trust-bank UMA
offering for the better part of four years now. -FWR
Purchase reproduction rights to this article.
