SunGard has identified three primary objectives on which financial services firms are focusing:

- Agile Growth – Firms are seeking strategies that will boost business agility and lay the foundation for future revenue growth. This is driving three trends: 1- improving productivity and multi-channel capability to deliver better client service; 2- adoption of technologies and processes that help firms to be more nimble and innovative; and 3- a need to find new revenue sources in new geographies and products.

Companies that are using SunGard’s technology to help achieve agile growth include Canadian Western Trust Company (CWT), which offers accounts services to independent financial advisors, mortgage brokers and individuals.

Matt Colpitts, Canadian Western Trust Company’s vice president & general manager, said, “In order to continue the strong momentum we’ve built over the last few years, we are expanding service to plans of all sizes by tailoring more products to meet our clients’ unique needs. We chose SunGard’s solution because it helps us further personalize our services while supporting continued business growth.”

- Competitive Advantage through Risk and Regulatory Compliance – Over half of CIOs in financial services spending 30% or more of their IT change budget on regulatory compliance.* Firms are looking to leverage that investment by taking an opportunistic approach to regulation and turning compliance into a competitive advantage. Complete visibility of risk, strategic compliance planning, reporting automation and collateral optimization will become major focus areas for firms in achieving this approach.

An example of this is Direxion Funds, a provider of alternative strategy mutual funds and exchange traded funds, which implemented SunGard technology to monitor staff use of social media. The solution helps the firm by allowing its employees to take advantage of the opportunities offered by social media platforms to help drive competitive advantage while still complying with regulations such as FINRA notice 10-06.

Andy O’Rourke, chief marketing officer at Direxion Funds said, “SunGard’s solution for social media surveillance offers an intuitive user interface, flexible features and easy implementation. Our compliance officers have greater confidence in allowing our employees to participate on social media. The solution helps them monitor that activity and helps protect the firm from regulatory breaches and reputational risk.”

- Smarter Operations – Many organizations need to do ”more with less,” which is driving a focus on building smarter operations through streamlining processes and workflow to help boost efficiency and improve data quality and management to help drive better business intelligence. In addition, firms continue to outsource non-value-add IT functions in order to focus more resources on revenue-driving business activities. Many firms are opting for private cloud environments, managed services and business process outsourcing (BPO) to help manage costs and operate more efficiently. The financial services industry is expected to increase its spending on outsourcing of services and technology at a rate more than two times that of traditional onsite IT spending through 2015.**

To help build smarter operations, CBRE Global Investors migrated to and went live on SunGard’s hosting and managed services for treasury and risk in less than four weeks.

Joram Vesters, EMEA Director of Operations & IT for CBRE Global Investors said, “One of the main advantages that SunGard offers is its ability to host and manage software and many of the peripheral daily operational tasks associated with its solutions within a control and service framework that is aligned with our own commitment towards our investors.”

*Compliance versus Innovation: Should CIOs Have to Choose? Xantus, March 2011.
** Sourcing, Resourcing, or Outsourcing: Globalizing Operations in Financial Services by 2015, CEB Tower Group, December 2012

About SunGard Financial Systems
SunGard Financial Systems provides mission-critical software and IT services to institutions in virtually every segment of the financial services industry. The primary purpose of these systems is to automate the many detailed processes associated with trading, managing investment portfolios and accounting for investment assets. These solutions address the processing requirements of a broad range of users within financial services, including asset managers, traders, custodians, compliance officers, treasurers, insurers, risk managers, hedge fund managers, plan administrators and clearing agents. In addition, we also provide professional services that focus on application implementation and integration of these solutions and on custom software development.

About SunGard
SunGard is one of the world’s leading software and technology services companies. SunGard serves approximately 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries and has approximately 17,000 employees. SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, education and the public sector. SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software. With annual revenue of over $4.0 billion, SunGard is one of the largest privately held IT software and services companies. For more information, please visit sungard.com