SS&C Advent - Competitors & Alternatives [Geneva, Moxy, APX, Genesis]

Advent Software Competitors

Are you considering SS&C Advent’s investment management solutions and are curious about how they stack up against the competition?

A downside of Advent is its multiple solutions. The synchronisation of transactions, positions, and cash between systems is expensive and risky. This syncing is further complicated by the fact that this data is state-dependent. For example, Genesis might have simulated orders, which impact cash and need to be sent to the Rules Manager for pre-trade compliance checks. This is a different data view from the formal post-trade compliance check triggered by APX or Geneva.

The user workflow becomes fragmented, and it’s difficult to understand what data you’re looking at in the various applications. When something goes wrong (e.g. a settlement failure), the risk of incorrect trading has increased significantly.

Note: Vendor information here is based on company websites, industry publications and online review sites such as G2, Gartner, TrustRadius and Capterra. Such pages have been reviewed in June 2024 as a basis for this article.

Back Office Comparison

Advent APX & Geneva vs Limina IMS

Back office capabilities of Geneva and APX, compared to Limina.

Geneva

APX

Limina IMS

Portfolio Administration

Reporting

Portfolio Accounting

Import-export engine

CRM

Front Office Comparison

Advent Moxy & Genesis vs Limina IMS

Front office capabilities of Genesis and Moxy, compared to Limina.

Genesis

Moxy

Limina IMS

Portfolio Rebalacing

Order Management

Order Planner

Data quality controls

Investment Compliance

Why consider Limina IMS

Covering functional needs is step one. Beyond that, any system must be smooth to work with to be a better alternative.

One system

Single database
Holistic workflows

No workarounds With all features covered, there is no need for workflows outside the system.

SAVE 4 HOURS PER DAY Efficient workflows and clever automation through an exception-based approach.

SS&C Advent Overview

SS&C Advent offers a comprehensive suite of products, including:

Advent Portfolio Exchange (APX) – a portfolio administration & CRM solution
Moxy – an order management system
Genesis – a rebalancing tool on top of Moxy
Geneva – a portfolio accounting system

Clients of APX, Moxy and Genesis are typically used by wealth managers. Geneva, on the other hand, is used primarily by fund administrators and hedge funds.

Steve Strand and Stephanie DiMarco founded Advent Software in 1983. In the mid 1990s the first version of Geneva was developed with Duquesne Capital and Goldman Sachs to service hedge funds. APX was launched ten years later. Genesis is the newest tool to see the light of day, launched in 2017 on top of Moxy. When Moxy was first released is unclear from online sources, but we find references as far back as 2010 for version 7.0 – so a guess would be it’s somewhere between 1995 and 2005.

SS&C Technologies acquired Advent Software in 2015 for approximately $2.63 billion. The company is now known as “SS&C Advent”.

Advent Geneva – Features & Competitors

Ledger and Knowledge Date

Geneva offers a complete financial general ledger, making it suitable as the accounting system. It has a notable “knowledge date”-feature that allows you to run a report with data as it was known on a specific date. E.g. a NAV report per the end of last month with the data that was known at that time. You can then run another report with the same NAV date but with current knowledge. All changes made to trades, cash, instruments, etc since, will be included in the latter, and you can start to compare.

Other accounting systems struggle with an equivalent of the “knowledge date” concept. At Limina, we called these “as was” and “as is” views of the portfolio, and we support both.

Reporting building

As of 2009, SS&C GlobeOp produced 25,000 reports daily from its Geneva installation. This indicates the scale of which Geneva is capable.

Client profiles

With eight out of 10 prime brokers and 17 out of the top 20 fund administrators as users, Geneva has achieved significant market penetration in the hedge fund sector. It also serviced 8/10 prime brokers and 17/20 top fund admins as of 2011. It’s unlikely to have changed massively to date.

Advent Geneva Competitors

Alternatives to Advent Geneva include:

SimCorp Dimension
Fundguard

Limina is only an alternative to Geneva if you’ve outsourced the ledger (we do shadow NAV, but not the sub-ledger).

Advent APX Overview

Advent Portfolio Exchange (APX) combines portfolio administration and CRM capabilities. It allows you to manage client relationships and administer their portfolios in one place. The portfolio functionality centres around reporting (out-the-box and customisable) as GIPS-compliant return calculations.

APX primarily caters to wealth managers and financial advisors seeking to centralise their client management in one place.

Competitors of APX

Alternatives to APX might be a system covering less CRM-functionality but a broader feature set on the investment side. This creates the need to have a CRM separately and instead streamlines the entire investment process. Overall, this increases efficiency and strengthens your capabilities

Alternatives on the investment management workflows:

Alternatives for the CRM:

Salesforce
Hubspot

Advent Moxy Overview

Advent Moxy is an order management system (OMS) designed for wealth managers. It’s built to manage many portfolios simultaneously, bulk-processing for many portfolios.

As an OMS, Moxy connects to trading venues for execution and to custodians for reconciliation.

Competitors

Moxy competitors include standalone front office systems like Thinkfolio and Bloomberg AIM. More common choices nowadays are holistic front-to-mid or front-to-back solutions, such as:

Charles River IMS
Limina Trade Order Management System

Oddly enough, SS&C competes with itself when it comes to order management through Eze OMS, which is an alternative to Moxy. Eze is slightly more geared towards hedge funds, rather than wealth managers.

Advent Genesis Overview

Advent Genesis is a cloud-based portfolio management solution designed to streamline workflows for portfolio managers. Genesis is an add-on to Moxy, offering stronger capabilities for portfolio modelling and enabling those to be performed in a cloud-based environment. It can rebalance vast amounts of portfolios at once.

Genesis was launched in 2017.

Competitors to Advent Genesis

SS&C Competitors to Advent Genesis include primarily:

Bloomberg PORT (and the more recently launched PMGO, which is part of Bloomberg AIM)
Charles River IMS
Blackrock Aladdin
Limina Investment Management Software

What clients are saying

AvanzaAsset management department of bank

By adopting Limina's scalable platform, Avanza has launched 33% additional funds without having to scale its investment operations team. They achieved:

Decreased dependency on single individuals - by replacing spreadsheets
Improved operational efficiency - by increased automation

AtleBoutique asset manager

"It’s such a modern portfolio management system – not only because it’s cloud-based, but the entire process flow and information I get is complete and up to date. It’s simple to use, flexible to work with, and it minimises the time for the entire trade workflow." / Portfolio Manager
"Limina helps us reduce operational risks." / CEO

SS&C Advent Competitors [Geneva, Moxy, Genesis, APX]