Steve Steffy, director of operations at Trilogy Global Advisors, a boutique firm and SS&C Technologies client, provides insight into key industry trends in this second installment of a two-part series.
(FTF News interviewed Steve Steffy, director of operations at Trilogy Global Advisors during the SS&C Deliver customer conference of SS&C Technologies in Las Vegas last month. Based in Winter Park, Fla., Trilogy is a boutique firm that specializes in emerging markets equities. Trilogy’s portfolios are a mix of both traditional growth companies and early-stage growth companies, according to the firm, which is a client of SS&C. During the recent meeting with Steffy, he provided insights on major IT and industry trends, which forms the second part of a two-part series. The first part focused on the firm’s installations of SS&C Recon and SS&CNet and ran last week.)
Steve Steffy, director of operations, Trilogy Global Advisors
Q: So, as far as industry trends, what are your current concerns about reconciliation systems as they are now?
A: Well, cybersecurity is a big one.
So, for us, we have got to be able to get the information securely — that’s first and foremost. If we can’t get it in securely, we can’t get it. So, that’s the first thing we have to be able to do.
And, like I said earlier, we get FTP [file transfer protocol] files, and they have to be encrypted. There’s a lot of work with our IT teams to do that. I think most people can do that now.
As far as reconciliation systems go, the information has to be easy to read, to identify which pieces of information are most important to get from our reconciliation team.
Is it a true break? Or is it a timing issue? Do I need to have it intraday, or at the end of the day? Are the positions in the right place? So, these are the kinds of things we need to be able to identify quickly, in a nice dashboard or a report kind of manner,
For instance, with [SS&C] Recon, we use Crystal to create some of our reports, and we can run five or six reports pretty quickly. We can see which accounts have work that needs to be done on them, and which accounts will have a cash difference and why.
And this is where it’s kind of great — to be able to get in there and type in the reasons and to be able to, when a client’s auditor comes in and says, ‘I want to see these different types of reconciliations,’ tell them why there are differences, store it, and make sure that it’s available.
Cyber-security is on everybody’s docket. It has changed so much of what we do, and what we watch for, and how we are protecting ourselves.
When we bring in a file, is that file what they say it is? Is it clean? I think that that’s a very big issue.
As SS&C has come to know, it’s getting requests from us, in particular, and probably from many other firms, wanting to make sure that they are getting their information correctly and passing it on.
Q: Do you get excited about cloud computing?
A: We’ve changed our thought process behind hosting a while ago. … Our reporting environment, our performance environment, our accounting system, our network — everything that we use from the SS&C perspective is actually hosted by SS&C.
So, from a cloud perspective, even our OMS [order management system] and so many of our other efforts such as cyber-security, it’s been making sure that everybody is on the same page and protecting themselves the way they should.
And, it’s been great because it puts the onus on SS&C and others to make sure that they’re doing what they should be doing to protect us and to keep up with the right technologies for their own internal systems.
We made that transition probably about five or six years ago.
Q: What was the thought process before?
A: It’s a funny thing. We used to think that it was great to be the end-all, be-all of what we monitored, how we passed that along, and how we told the vendors how it was going be in our systems.
When we were doing an upgrade…before our old database was filled to capacity and crashed, we were scrambling to figure out what we were going to do, how we were going to keep up with what was going forward with the amount of data that was being stored.
I mean it was just going crazy and we just really found that at end of the day, the vendors have a better handle on how they’re going to get their data out, how they’re going to store the data, how they’re going keep up with the changes in technology, and how to get the better processors or get the right equipment in-house.
When you start putting all that into the equation, it can get expensive pretty quickly.
So, we thought it best to let the technology people be the technology people and we’ll be the investment management team.
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