SunGard purchases Financial Technology Integrators

FWR Staff

21 January 2008

ASP portfolio-management provider extends SunGard's trust-bank WM offering. SunGard has purchased Financial Technology Integrators , 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 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 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.