Operations in the cloud
Acceleration in cloud-based investment management operations
Last year, SimCorp witnessed an unprecedented acceleration in the adoption of the SimCorp Platform, our cloud-based service that allows institutional investors to focus on their core business in the quest for growth and differentiation.
Jakob Hojland
Commercial Director, Cloud Services, SimCorp
A significant part of new customers opted for this consumption model, and we are currently helping our existing customers in their journey to the cloud, where the service carries out tasks such as running, operating and managing the entire investment-management technology platform.
In 2021, eight customers joined our cloud community, all together representing a total of 1,007 end-users managing more than USD bn 1,578 AuM (Asset Under Management). This constitutes an increase of 23 percent in Simcorp cloud-based customers support around the world (in United States, Canada, France, Australia, Belgium, Spain, Lichtenstein and United Arab Emirates), across industries (Pension, Asset Management, Insurance, Banking and Sovereign Wealth) and business size. In addition, 75 percent of new SimCorp customers onboarded chose our cloud based SimCorp Platform.
We believe that investment management operations successful transition to the cloud can be explained to the many high value benefits it brings such as increased agility, faster time to market, best-in-class security and compliance, access to ecosystem-enabled innovation and improved cost-effectiveness. We can also now observe clearly that cloud-first strategy is becoming the preferred target operating model the buy-side industry.
For one of Australia’s leading retail superannuation and investments platforms, Colonial First State (CFS), who decided in 2021 to move their SimCorp investment management solution from on-premise to PaaS (Platform as a Service), the new cloud-based platform will enable them to focus on investment analytics and harness insights that can be shared with advisers and their clients, helping to bring to life how customer money is invested while enabling advisers to differentiate their service in the market.
Furthermore, as a new SimCorp customer, COMGEST, an independent, international asset management group headquartered in Paris and with offices globally, has decided to replace its Front-to-Back system with our investment and data management solutions, both cloud hosted in the Simcorp Platform. These changes are driven by a need for a common platform to improve synergies between all business units and to improve scalability, capacity for industrialization, and time to market for future needs.
To complement technology options, as a leading provider of investment management solutions, SimCorp partnered in 2020 with Microsoft and its Azure public cloud solution. With trusted technologies as a backbone for investment management operations, SimCorp is in a unique position to deliver speed, innovation, scale, security, automation, and increased connectivity through API’s since we invest solely on behalf of all our customers.
The SimCorp Platform is unrivaled in the sense that we take more responsibility in all the areas where we can deliver scale and support differentiation, allowing our customers to focus on core business and financial innovation in their quest for alpha generating activities.