Besides updates on important topics along compliance/regulatory, trustee/board,  Fund reporting modernization topics, much of the conference consisted of deep dive strategic and tactical sessions for asset managers to explore together in an open discussion format:

Growing and Retaining Assets — leveraging segmentation and technology to get the right message to the right audience.

Same Strategy / Multiple Products: Mutual Fund, Private Fund, CITs and more —  strategies for driving growth by investigating how different pooled structures can target different market segments and open new avenues to gather assets.

ETF Landscape: Can you compete? — panelists explored the lay of the land and the keys to success for launching an ETF.

Generate Additional Revenue for your Fund — maximizing a fund’s operational efficiency was explored.

Cyber Vision: Seeing today’s landscape — The need for thorough, ongoing employee education and testing was emphasized as a crucial first step, along with strong enforcement against violators of firm cyber policies. A major warning was given that executives of firms need to know exactly where all their data is being held and who precisely has access to it. It was pointed out that many executives either could not answer those questions or were working on incorrect assumptions.

Technology — Of particular interest were the remarks by Gary Tenkman, CEO and Jason Stevens, CTO of Ultimus on the intricate technology challenges of integrating two recent Ultimus acquisitions (Woodfield Fund Administration and LeverPoint Management) and the integration with The Gemini Companies. They outlined how they saw this challenge as an opportunity to reassess their data strategy and decided to build it from the ground up - to not just cobble it together, but cherry pick and build off of their best technologies and experienced technology teams across all firms.

Tenkman: “It’s not just the strength of the technology that you have but how you use it, especially developing it with your client partners in mind. We now have not just the most advanced technology in the industry, but also the right people to facilitate sharing that technology with our asset manager clients. Our reassessment and implementation of systems across the enterprise also allows us to pivot, a quicker pivot, to future client-facing technology.  It’s about how much we can drive ourselves from just the back-office and gain momentum in the middle office by supporting our clients’ needs, making it easier for asset managers to use and leverage new technologies.”

Stevens: “Our tech footprint really changed especially with the Gemini merger. Instead of trying to fit Gemini’s and Ultimus’ infrastructures together into one or the others legacy data center, it gave us the opportunity to think ahead, to re-plan, to re-design our technology infrastructure. We made a strategic decision for this to more than a successful merger of companies and systems, but to think several years down the road to where we want to be. We decided to build a new cloud-based data center from the ground up to be the new engine for our company and not be constrained by current physical hardware and software. We are now in the final phases of this new data center migration and excited to conceive and then integrate this across the enterprise the way we want, versus being held captive by legacy systems and capabilities.”

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