SS&C is often known for growth through acquisition, but this really only tells part of the story. In 2020, SS&C spent more than $471 million on research and development, and we count among our colleagues some of the top software developers across the world. As a technology house, we drive not only new solutions for our clients but also move the dial for the financial services industry as a whole.
In May 2021, we announced one such transformational project: SS&C Lyric.
What is Lyric? What will it do for SS&C’s clients today—and tomorrow? Read on to find out.
In recent years, SS&C has led the way in developing front-end tools for financial services organizations, digitizing the experience for the investors, advisors and fund managers that SS&C serves. Lyric is the natural—yet ambitious—next step to revolutionize the back end of the operation.
Most of SS&C’s financial services clients across all market segments face similar challenges around data—both unstructured data and real-time access to data. Too much is siloed in different systems, and there are too many painful handovers between different third parties, which again, increasingly need to happen in real time. This doesn’t relate to one process or one area of functionality; the entire industry ecosystem simply isn’t as efficient as it could—or should—be. Until now.
Lyric is setting out to fix the entire chain with a true open-architecture model providing a full end-to-end experience. We are applying the latest technologies in a microservices environment linked to SS&C’s underlying registers. This may have different applications for different market segments, but Lyric is a project that will touch all corners of financial services, and all SS&C clients can benefit from this bold reimagining of our financial service ecosystem.
With software projects, a key question is always “when?” The answer is “now.”
In subsequent blog posts in this series, we will explore how Lyric is set to transform the ecosystem for retail alternatives and liquidity funds this year. This is not a traditional behemoth project that has a distant end date when everything goes live; pieces will be built then rolled out continuously. This is incremental change at pace.
Lyric is only possible because, at SS&C, we own and develop our technology. We are not limited by third-party vendors. As new technologies are developed, new challenges arise, or trends become apparent—we can move, and quickly.
