Tom Secaur Discusses Service Provider Shift to Data

Major service providers are switching their pitches from telling asset managers how much money they can save fund shops by taking on the mundane operational tasks to promoting the value they can bring through better data management and analytics.

Service providers and consultants say this data-driven outsourcing strategy is increasingly seen in middle-office outsourcing deals that package traditional middle-office functions, such as trade processing, reconciliations, corporate actions and investment accounting, with new data aggregation, storage and analytics services.

"There's definitely a follow the leader mentality" among service providers in adapting their middle-office services to the data demands, says Tom Secaur, chief operating officer at Citisoft. Custodians and fund administrators no longer need to take on a firm's entire middle office just to reach the scale necessary to make deals profitable. They can instead ingrain themselves into a manager's operations by serving as the hub for operations and portfolio data, he says.

For more insight on how service providers are changing their value proposition to meet increasing data demands, read the full article on Ignites.