Hicke will succeed Founder Alfred P. West, Jr., who is transitioning to the role of Executive Chairman after successfully leading and growing SEI for more than 50 years. The executive management team, currently reporting to West, will report to Hicke effective June 1. 

The firm writes that throughout his 24-year career at SEI, Hicke has held a number of senior leadership positions across the company’s global businesses, playing an important role in creating and executing SEI’s business strategy. His diverse experience informs his commitment to the company’s strengths across its three pillars of expertise: investments, operations, and technology. 

Hicke previously served as a senior vice president, leading SEI’s U.K. Asset Management and Private Banking businesses and significantly contributing to the expansion of SEI’s global footprint. As chief information officer, he is responsible for SEI’s information technology strategy and execution, the company’s U.S. investment operations, and leading SEI Sphere, a new business initiative in cyber and data protection services. 

As executive chairman, West will work closely with Hicke and SEI’s executive management team to ensure a smooth and successful transition. West will remain focused on further advancing SEI’s position as a global provider of technology and investment solutions that connect the financial services industry. 

West, SEI Chairman and Founder, says: “It has been an honour to lead SEI since founding the company in 1968, and I am incredibly proud of all that we have accomplished over the last 50-plus years. Innovation is the key to success, and we must continually move our business forward in order to meet our global clients’ evolving needs. I’m confident that Ryan’s experience at SEI, his focus on growth and innovation, leadership skills, and Press deep understanding of our culture, clients, and teammates make him the right choice to serve as SEI’s next CEO. SEI has an incredibly strong foundation for continued growth and the best talent in the industry, and I look forward to continuing to build brave futures in my new role as Executive Chairman.” 

Carl Guarino, Chair of the Selection Committee, SEI Board of Directors, says: “On behalf of the entire SEI Board, I want to thank Al for his visionary leadership and significant contributions in establishing SEI as the trusted partner and market leader we are today. As we considered the next chapter for SEI, the Board and Al undertook a thoughtful and collaborative approach to succession planning over the last 12 months to identify the right CEO. We believe Ryan is the ideal person to lead our company forward and deliver strong results across our business globally for years to come. He is incredibly talented and committed to our culture, clients, and communities.” 

Hicke says: “I have the privilege of working alongside the most talented team in the industry each day, and I’m honoured to serve as SEI’s next CEO. Al has been a tremendous mentor to me, and I’m grateful for his partnership and support over the years. He is a visionary leader who disrupted the financial services industry more than 50 years ago and established SEI as the trusted partner we are today. I look forward to continuing to unlock SEI’s potential, and I’m energized by the courage of our global workforce to capture the exciting opportunities ahead. SEI is uniquely positioned in the financial services industry to help our clients grow and manage change with confidence.” 
 

The Verity Platform optimises the way that analysts and portfolio managers generate, share, debate, and act on investment research conducted for actively managed portfolios. The world’s leading asset managers, alternative fund managers, pensions, endowments, and superannuation funds utilise Verity to access data and analytics, enhance internal workflows to optimise time management of analysts, reduce compliance risk, and organise research content.  

“The launch of the Verity Platform marks a pivotal moment in the evolution of investment management,” says Andrew Robson, CEO of Verity. “Our 2021 Investor Survey revealed that institutional investors are demanding a single solution to help them consume and act on the staggering amount of information available. And they need to do so within their existing workflows, not from siloed and disparate systems. With a data-rich research management solution, Verity meets those demands. And as we further enrich the platform with more and more data going forward, it will continue to empower modern investment teams to do their best work.”

Confirming long-held market sentiment, the 2021 Verity Investor Survey showed that 63 per cent of asset managers say their top priority is to integrate research and data with other investment processes. It also revealed that while 72 per cent reported more data has made it easier to identify alpha-generating ideas, 58 per cent said the abundance of data has made it harder to separate a true signal from all the noise. The Verity Platform was developed in part to respond to these challenges by elevating the most vital information at the right time and within existing workflows.  

“Most front-office applications sacrifice either usability for analysts or functionality for portfolio managers and compliance,” says Will Keuper, Vice President of Product for Verity. “The new Verity platform and overhauled user interface delivers both. End-users get the ease of use they might expect from a mass-market tool, while PMs and operations users get data-driven, investment-grade workflow and reporting capabilities. Plus, compliance benefits from a centralised, real-time audit trail for reviewing research.”  

Satuit Technologies by Tier1 Financial Solutions (Tier1), a global specialist in CRM, AML compliance and fraud prevention solutions, has partnered with Versoft Consulting to bring enhanced integration to the Satuit product suite and portfolio accounting solutions. 

The partnership extends Satuit’s offerings to their asset management client base, aimed at increasing functionality and lowering costs by enabling integrated up-to-date client data.

Satuit is leveraging the integration capabilities of Versoft Consulting’s VAAS CONNECT suite to allow a fluid conversation to occur between the Satuit product suite and a wide range of portfolio accounting systems. Satuit will host the data in its cloud application making it accessible to users on both desktop and mobile devices.

“As the financial industry becomes increasingly data-driven, it can be incredibly difficult and time consuming for relationship managers to sift through vast amounts of information to identify actionable insights,” says Matt Braman, Manager of Custom Solutions at Versoft Consulting. “Our partnership with Satuit aims to address these issues by delivering investor portfolio data directly into the CRM or Investor Portal, greatly improving workflow efficiency.” 

Satuit has made several enhancements to its product suite to make it easier for users to uncover these insights including a new user interface with dashboard charts, administrator functions, and form rule management. Its API offering was also extended, allowing clients to easily capture critical updates and trigger downstream processes via their workflows. Subscribing to Versoft Consulting’s service suite, VAAS CONNECT, to enhance CRM and portfolio accounting integrations is just the latest move to improve client experience. 

“Over the past couple of years, we have seen firms increasingly leverage CRM to not just organise client data and track opportunities, but also to manage investor data for insights,” says Manish Patel, Chief Operating Officer, CRM at Tier1. “By working with Versoft Consulting, we are able to deliver consolidated, insight-driven investor information in one solution that can be securely accessed anywhere.” 

Temenos’ scalable cloud platform will power Green Dot’s technology stack, enabling the leading Banking Platform Services (BaaS) provider’s partners to embed financial services – including credit, payment, lending, DDA accounts and other features – into their ecosystems. The Temenos Banking Cloud will also support Green Dot’s 33 million-plus customers who are served across its retail and direct-to-consumer digital banking channels.
 
“We selected Temenos as our platform partner because of their hyper-efficient and secure open-cloud capabilities, which align with and support our goals to provide exceptional, scalable solutions to our customers and partners,” says Dan Henry, President and CEO of Green Dot. “This is a critical component of our mission to seamlessly connect people to their money, both directly through our digital bank and products like GO2bank, and through our valued partners.”
 
Max Chuard, CEO, Temenos, says: “At Temenos we have a vision to power a world of banking where financial institutions and businesses open opportunities for people to achieve their ambitions. Green Dot continues to pioneer new ways to support underbanked Americans, through its own financial products as well as its strategy to offer embedded finance through Banking Platform Services to the world’s leading brands. Temenos’ intelligent, cloud-based open banking platform will drive innovation and growth as Green Dot continues to build out its ecosystem and grow its digital bank platform and customer base. We’re excited to partner with Green Dot to make banking more human and accessible for everyone.”
 
Jacqueline White, President – Americas, Temenos, says: “Green Dot is a technology-driven company with a mission to seamlessly connect people to their money. We are proud that Green Dot selected The Temenos Banking Cloud to accelerate its impressive track record of growth, innovation and social impact. We are pleased to see strong traction in the US market across all our products, as we continue to support financial institutions to deliver value to their customers.”

The new solution delivers an end-to-end machine learning (ML) powered Anti-Money Laundering platform covering transaction monitoring, name screening, alert prioritisation, and customer risk scoring.

“The application of machine learning to improve the results of primary transaction, KYC, or sanction screening services makes sense for firms across the financial services spectrum that have entrenched investments in legacy applications,” says Alastair McGill, General Manager of Data Control Solutions at Broadridge. “By leveraging new ML techniques to identify suspicious activity, we are enabling firms to make faster and more informed decisions, enhancing operational efficiencies, realising savings, and bringing together entire Data Control functions within one intelligent automation platform.”

The current financial crime prevention ecosystem is fragmented and vulnerable to emerging threats. The amount of money laundered annually stands at USD1.6 to USD2 trillion and less than 1 per cent of this laundered money is traced. Many existing rules-based AML solutions in financial institutions are not sufficient as money laundering techniques become more sophisticated and the resulting reputational and financial risks firms face accelerate.

The Broadridge AMLS is for firms and institutions looking to enhance their anti-money laundering surveillance to detect illicit money flows and bad actors. Broadridge’s product, powered by Tookitaki, is an ML-based AML platform that global financial institutions can use to substantially decrease false alerts and realise productivity gains while improving risk mitigation. It leverages innovative machine-learning techniques like AutoML, federated learning and network science to accurately detect complex money laundering activities and triage legacy system alerts through a Smart Alert Management system to accurately prioritise alerts for either rapid disposition or increased due diligence.

Broadridge’s AMLS platform complements existing rules-based systems by utilising supervised machine-learning to identify thousands of risk factors that legacy solutions cannot replicate, to detect threats, and to self-learn via a proven Champion-Challenger framework that keeps pace with increasingly complex laundering techniques.

This achievement demonstrates Options’ commitment to providing a modern, Multi-Cloud platform complete with VMware Cloud capabilities, including deployment, integration, and cost-optimisation. The partnership with VMware allows Options to seamlessly integrate with the public cloud, enabling the orchestration of client Multi-Cloud environments with ease. Options has dedicated significant resources to achieving this accolade, with employees attaining over 30 VMware certifications to ensure an industry-leading experience which will benefit their clients.

Options’ President and CEO, Danny Moore, says: “The receipt of VMware Cloud Provider Principal Partner status uniquely positions Options as the only provider dedicated to the Financial Services space that also holds SOC1, SOC2, and SOC3 accreditation. This, in addition to achieving our third Microsoft Gold Competency, proves Options truly is a leading cloud service provider in the Financial Services industry.”

Today’s news marks the latest in a series of announcements for Options, including their expansion to Canada with the opening of a Toronto Office, a win at TradingTech Insights USA Awards in the Best Managed Services Solution for Market Data category and a partnership with Packets2Disk to provide Market-Leading Network Analytics to clients.

In 2019, Options received investment from Boston-based Private Equity Firm, Abry Partners. This investment has enabled Options to accelerate its growth strategy and develop its technology platform whilst expanding its reach in key financial centres globally.

The ability to pause, rewind, and listen again during live earnings calls was never possible before Aiera, the only live event monitoring & financial search platform covering all available Wall Street events. At the heart of this audio innovation is Aiera’s proprietary event connection workflow, which has paved the way for the largest library of live investor events anywhere in the world.

“Aiera continues to push the envelope in event access and monitoring,” says Margaret King, Franklin Templeton’s VP of Fintech Partnerships and Strategic Investment. “And Franklin Templeton is pleased to support this important area of innovation, along with Aiera’s other investors.”

“Advanced research tooling is mission critical to the success of investment teams and corporate functions,” says Fin Venture Capital’s General Managing Partner and Founder, Logan Allin. “And we are thrilled by Aiera’s success in raising the bar on quality and accessibility across event management and research.”

Tone of voice is nearly 40 per cent of an entire spoken message, per the social psychology and neuroscience literature. Understanding how something is said when one is speaking can be almost as important as the textual content itself. Adding Helios’ tonal sentiment scoring provides valuable context to the many features users of Aiera have already come to expect. Tonal sentiment can be layered onto textually derived topic monitoring, speech-to-text transcription, one-click event access, collaboration and research platform tooling, and much more.

According to Ken Sena, CEO of Aiera, says: “The incorporation of analysis into human interactivity and the subtleties of voice is a natural evolution for Aiera, and it builds on the live audio controls and event access services we currently provide our users.”

Helios CEO Sean Austin, says: “With Aiera, we will be leveraging tonal sentiment at the sentence level to understand when the voice sounds incongruent with the words. This allows scaled outlier detection in the growing universe of Aiera audio.”

This latest investment will support Greengage’s ongoing expansion, technology developments and team growth, including the hire of a new CFO, Head of Operations, Head of Compliance and Money Laundering Reporting Officer.
 
As a long-standing investor and builder in digital finance, IOVlabs is an ideal partner for fellow Gibraltar-based firm Greengage. IOVlabs’ vision of creating socially responsible and inclusive financial technology tools chimes closely with Greengage’s own mission, including its goal to support the expansion of B2B lending to underserved markets such as SMEs. Greengage will be supporting RSK Blockchain’s, smart contract platform and the RSK Infrastructure Framework (RIF), which provides the building blocks for a fully decentralised economy.
 
Greengage CEO, Sean Kiernan, says: “IOVlabs have long been recognised in Gibraltar – and globally – as one of the top pioneers in the digital finance world. Their team combines deep technology expertise with a vision to build an internet of value which provides greater financial freedom and is open to everyone”. He continued “We are excited to have an institutional investor of this calibre and to explore together the future possibilities of cryptocurrencies, digital identity and clean, decentralised finance developed on top of the world leading RSK blockchain and RSK Infrastructure Framework platforms. We look forward to building on this investment to bring innovative new financial services solutions to the market.”
 
Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar, IOVlabs CEO said: “We are delighted to partner with Greengage and join them in making a key contribution to build a more equitable and decentralized financial system. We are excited to be part of the growth of their robust digital banking platform, which uses advanced technologies to facilitate cost-effective transactions for underserved SMEs within both traditional currency and cryptoasset markets”.
 
Greengage is currently engaged in the regulatory approval process with the GFSC to receive a Gibraltar banking licence.

The timing of the raise coincides with the firm having crossed USD100 million in annual revenue-run rate and 250 million API calls per month from its B2B customers. This is the first institutional round of funding for Prime Trust.

Led by Mercato Partners, the round also includes strategic participation from Samsung Next, Nationwide, Commerce Ventures, Ayon Capital, Kraken Ventures, STCAP, s20 Capital, Seven Peaks Ventures, Diverse Angels, University Growth Fund and Nevcaut Ventures. Along with the raise, Zane Busteed, a principal investor at Mercato Partners Traverse Fund, and Tom Gonser, of Docusign and Seven Peaks Ventures, will join Prime Trust’s board of directors.

“We are experiencing an explosion of new financial services driven by digital native consumers, and nontraditional markets and assets,” says Zane Busteed, principal investor at Mercato Partners Traverse Fund.  “The biggest challenge is turning these ideas into user-ready services. Prime Trust solves this with fast, flexible and secure technology that innovators can use to create products catering to new markets and customers.”

Gonser says: “It’s amazing to see a company with the same explosive potential that I saw in the early days of DocuSign. Similar to how e-signatures radically changed the way we do business, Prime Trust’s infrastructure will revolutionise the future of finance.”

The funding will be used to add systems and personnel who are working on expanding the company’s B2B market share in crypto, including digital asset exchanges, banks, consumer retailers, OTC desks, tokenised assets and wallets, and in crowdfunding, including broker-dealers, crowdfunding portals and real estate syndicators.

“Prime Trust continues to significantly exceed profitability and revenue projections. This round is key to further accelerating the growth we’ve had this year, and we’re thrilled to have these strategic investors join our rocketship,” says Rodrigo Vicuna, CFO of Prime Trust.

The raise will also allow Prime Trust to grow into new markets in payments and alternative assets including wealth tech, neobanks, registered investment advisers and alternative trading systems.

“The vision for Prime Trust was always clear – take the pain out of innovating in financial services. This round of funding will accelerate our ability to keep up with the needs of fintech innovators across a huge variety of applications in payments and alternative assets,” says Tom Pageler, CEO of Prime Trust.

Under the strategic partnership, 1066NOW’s Banking Integration Application (BIA) will enable easy and quick adoption of the Hudson Edge platform for Financial Markets’ institutions across a wide range of use cases and applications. The Edge platform resolves the issues faced by financial institutions when seeking flexibility, product enhancements, lower costs, faster deployment cycles and independence from fixed data models. 

“It was always our vision to extend the Hudson Edge platform to encompass a wider set of solutions outside our core products in the areas of Repo and alternative asset management. A recent example was the launch of the Hudson Trade Hospital for post trade optimisation,” says Michael Walliss, CEO of Hudson Fintech. “As we further extend coverage, we are delighted to be working with the team at 1066NOW to bring their deep Oracle Middleware and Project Engagement expertise to users of the Edge platform, to seamlessly integrate into existing Financial applications landscape”.

He added, “This shows the power of the Hudson Edge platform, where we are able to apply its unique features to a wide number of different use cases, which help leverage existing and installed components that financial institutions use as a core part of their businesses.”

“At 1066NOW we see numerous benefits for our clients utilising the unique Entity Components System (ECS) architecture offered by the Hudson Edge platform, as we include it within our BIA solution,” says John Collett, Founder and CEO of 1066NOW. “This partnership will enable seamless integration into the Oracle customer base within Financial Markets and solves many issues faced by Financial Institutions, using both On-Premise and Hybrid Cloud technical architectures.” 

He added, “This represents an exciting new phase in 1066NOW’s growth and development taking Hudson’s leading Financial services solution to benefit Oracle customers and enabling Digital Transformation.”

Hudson is the first Fintech to use ECS in Capital Markets. ECS is an advanced system architecture, supporting a flexible data model and independent workflows,  which allows for the adding and upgrading of functionality without impacting the existing code base, hence requiring minimal testing, while always adhering to coding best practices. This guarantees the software will be extendable, easy to maintain, and cost-effective in years to come rather than evolving into a costly and unmanageable problem.

1066NOW BIA is an integration and enablement solution that utilises Oracle Middleware technology for integration, performance and availability to provide the most robust and respondent capabilities needed for Financial systems and applications. This approach provides economies of scale to reduce cost across the enterprise and provide excellent and robust support structure globally required by Financial Markets’ participants. 1066NOW’s BIA can be implemented On-Premise or in the Cloud (Public, Private and Hybrid). 

For bank CIO’s looking to solve specific problems within their trading solutions where cost effective, simple to use and highly scalable solutions are important, the combination of 1066NOW BIA incorporating the Hudson Edge platform offers many unique benefits.