IBS Journal May 2015


‘We have historically provided guidance to Advent on where its products should go,


and are a great supporter of the vendor.’ Tyler Kim, Maples Fund Services


vices’ people, its proprietary data manage- ment solutions and its data visualisation dashboards. ‘This is what really makes the business,’ he states. Kim has a lengthy relationship with


Advent, having first installed Geneva back in 2007 at Northwater Capital Manage- ment, where he was CTO. ‘We were doing quite innovative things with Advent at Northwater Capital. We were one of the first clients on Geneva 7, and we also worked in partnership with the vendor to build out Geneva’s fee module.’ The innovation streak continued with Kim joining Maples Fund Services in 2009. The company ‘made a decision to invest heavily in systems to differentiate itself in a very competitive middle market space for fund administra- tion.’ An office in Montreal was set up to house IT and data management staff, and Geneva was installed on an outsourced basis hosted by Paladyne Systems (now part of Broadridge). ‘We opted for Paladyne simply because it was an easy thing to do,’ Kim explains. ‘We didn’t have to worry about the set-up, Paladyne got us up and running quickly.’ However, as time went on and Maples Fund Services grew – from $26 billion assets at the time of the project to over $50 billion today – ‘we simply out- grew it.’ So in 2014, Maples Fund Services carried out a major project to bring Geneva onto its own infrastructure, to its central- ised data centre in Ireland. Also, Paladyne’s peripheral applications for data manage- ment were replaced by Maples Fund Ser- vices’ in-house developed solutions. By becoming independent from Pala-


dyne, the fund administrator ‘took advan- tage of more of the native capabilities of Geneva,’ Kim says. ‘We worked closely with the Advent crew to make that happen. They were fantastic in supporting us in this endeavour.’ Maples Fund Services has nine loca-


tions around the world at present, and all are using one instance of Geneva that is hosted in Dublin. Geneva covers back office functionality (fund accounting) and also middle office, i.e. administration and outsourcing capabilities. ‘Originally, we were using Geneva for fund accounting only, but within a year we realised that we had an opportunity to penetrate new markets and gain new types of clients,’ Kim recalls. ‘So we moved into the middle office space with Geneva and started tar- geting not just fund structures but also institutional investors that were looking to better manage their separate accounts or that required the infrastructure to execute the do-it-yourself model rather than going to intermediaries. We moved towards helping clients to make better investment decisions rather than just keeping books and records.’ Geneva really helped the business grow, he says. Maples Fund Ser- vices more than doubled its business vol- umes in five years and expanded its Mon- treal office from eight people to 60. Geneva is one of the two main sys-


tems at Maples Fund Services. The oth- er one is Mshare, a transfer agency and shareholder record-keeping system from Linedata. Here, Maples Fund Services has also done some joint development, name-


© IBS Intelligence 2015


ly building a web front-end, which is now known as Linedata Reporting. ‘We were willing to be the guinea pigs. We defined the requirements, helped Linedata to get it working and became the first site for the system,’ Kim says. On the Geneva side, Maples Fund Ser-


vices has expanded functionality over the last year by implementing Geneva World Investor, principally to service onshore US clients. ‘We opened an office in Boston [in September 2014] and the types of clients in the onshore space are quite different to those offshore, which are the types of funds we have historically administered,’ he explains. ‘So we decided to go with Geneva World Investor last year to service the US onshore domestic space.’ It should be noted that at the time


of the acquisition, both SS&C and Advent emphasised the cross-selling opportuni- ties, and Kim comments that the marketing process to that effect has already begun. He adds, however, that other than a better reconciliation product (and Maples Fund Services is not limiting its sights on what SS&C/Advent could offer), ‘there are no solutions from SS&C that I am interested in at the moment’. He has the impression that SS&C’s legacy Financial Models Company products ‘are pretty much the same as they were before SS&C acquired them’. It will be up to SS&C – including his long-time part- ners from Advent – to convince him other- wise. In doing so, SS&C has an opportunity to demonstrate that its acquisitions indeed result in significant added value to its prod- uct offerings.


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