SS&C’s Bill Stone provides FTF News with insights about the Blue Prism acquisition and the company’s move into the Emirates.
From Bill Stone’s perspective as chairman and CEO of SS&C Technologies, the fairly recent advances that SS&C has made into the Abu Dhabi market and with artificial intelligence (A.I.) are examples of the same thing — the company is breaking new ground literally and figuratively in the highly competitive world of post-trade systems, software, services, and outsourcing.
Late last month, SS&C announced that it is expanding its fund administration business into the United Arab Emirates (UAE) via the launch of an Abu Dhabi office.
The UAE’s Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) has licensed the SS&C to offer fund administration services such as SS&C GlobeOp within the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM). For the moment, SS&C officials say that they have 180 clients in the Middle East, and 29 global clients have a presence within the ADGM designation.
For the past two years, SS&C has been working to build its presence in the UAE because “we find it to be a really good market and we believe that the regulatory regime and the government, in general, are very supportive,” Stone tells FTF News. “Obviously, they’re a very wealthy country with quite significant oil reserves and they want to build a 21st Century economy.”
SS&C has landed financial services clients that want the company to have “a local presence in the UAE,” Stone says. The client roster includes banks, asset managers, hedge funds, and private equity fund companies.
The launch of the Abu Dhabi office follows the news last year that Riyad Bank, a major financial institution in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia “has successfully transitioned its automation program to SS&C Blue Prism. The bank sought to upgrade its automation solution to support three main business objectives: customer experience, innovation, and performance culture,” according to SS&C.
The Middle East will be one of many regions that SS&C hopes will be attracted to the enterprise robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent automation solutions of SS&C Blue Prism, based in Warrington in the U.K., a town between Liverpool and Manchester.
Not surprisingly, Stone also likes being on the ground floor of the A.I. revolution coming for post-trade operations.
Bill Stone
“I think if you use the American Revolution as a proxy we’re at the Boston Tea Party,” Stone says. “The fires of independence are being lit across all 13 colonies and once that skirmish starts, there’s no turning back.”
Stone and SS&C say that the forthcoming skirmish was on their minds when SS&C completed its acquisition of Blue Prism Group for approximately $1.6 billion (£1.25 billion) in 2022.
With the acquisition, Blue Prism’s RPA business and “SS&C’s intelligent automation platform SS&C Chorus are highly complementary,” officials say. SS&C is cross-selling Blue Prism products to SS&C’s client base of more than 20,000 customers and is leveraging Blue Prism “to optimize internal business processes.”
The early results from the acquisition have been chronicled in a new study, “The Total Economic Impact of SS&C Blue Prism,” conducted by Forrester Consulting. The study finds that “a composite organization representative of interviewed customers using SS&C Blue Prism technologies saw a return on investment figure of 330 percent over three years, representing a net present value of $53.4 million.”
There is an “overall revenue growth of 5.4 percent CAGR for the composite customer, an 8 percent increase in productivity, and 7.3 percent increased employee retention, along with a payback time of less than six months,” according to Forrester.
The study appears to bolster Stone’s assertion that A.I. is going to have “a pretty big impact” upon securities operations. “I think the ability to catch things like breaks … before they age is something that we’ll be able to use,” Stone says.
SS&C will also apply A.I.’s ability “to give us insights into some of the large-scale processes that we run for our clients,” Stone says. “Some of our clients could do upwards of millions of trades a day … So getting that information and having it really sort of vetted before it goes flying into your accounting system is another valuable thing that A.I. can do.”
Helping with the revolution will be SS&C Blue Prism’s “digital workers.”
“Digital workers are the frontline to intelligent automation (IA): a combination of technologies including robotic process automation (RPA), business process management (BPM), process and task mining, no-code development, natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML),” according to the SS&C Blue Prism website.
Thus when SS&C sells a license to Blue Prism “we build an application around that license, we call that a digital worker,” Stone explains. “And so you might put a digital worker on know your customer [KYC]. So that digital worker would go out to all the different databases, find out all the information, collate it, and then have somebody approve the KYC effort.”
Digital workers are also helping SS&C with its offerings.
“We have digital workers by our different position units and our Global Investor and Distribution Services, GIDS, is a big user of Blue Prism, as is our fund administration business,” Stone says. “We’ve deployed something like 1,600 digital workers throughout our business and we think we’ll deploy another couple thousand this year.”
Digital workers are stepping in for tasks that humans find tedious.
“If you’re going to look at 400 monthly statements, you’re going to get tired at about statement number 82, and maybe you wake up when you’re on statement number 140,” Stone says. “But somebody’s got to go relook at 82 to 140. So I think on those kinds of tasks, it’s very effective.”
The same technology can be applied to anti-money laundering (AML), and other operational areas such as reconciliation and exception management.
“The great thing about digital workers — they don’t get tired. They keep doing the same thing. So it’s a real benefit. … So, we have a big business in this whole area of machine learning, robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing,” Stone says. “It’s something that we didn’t just talk about it, we did it and we’re a lot further along today because of that.”
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