Hi, everyone. Thank you for coming to our 2018 Analyst Day. I'm Justine Stone. I run Investor Relations for SS and C. I think we've got a great day for you guys with presentations from Bill Stone, Rahul Kanwar, Patrick Pedanti as well as I think about a dozen of our senior managers.
We also have demo stations right outside this room. Please check them out. It's some of our latest technology that we have to offer from various business units, including Intralinks and EZ software. And then we will be doing a demo at the end of the day of our latest product Singularity. I'd like to just read a Safe Harbor statement.
You guys have all heard it before, but please note that various remarks we make today about future expectations, plans and prospects, including the financial outlook we provide constitute forward looking statements for the purposes of Safe Harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward looking statements as a result of various important factors, including those discussed in the Risk Factors section of our most recent annual report on Form 10 ks, which is on file with the SEC and can also be accessed on our website. These forward looking statements represent our expectations only as of today, November 15, 2018. And while the company may elect to update these forward looking statements, it specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. With that said, again, we have a great program for you today.
Please withhold any questions to the designated Q and A period. We'll be having a short break after Bill, Rahul and Patrick take questions just to get re situated and so we get started on the second half of the day. But I'd like to introduce Bill Stone, Chairman and CEO of SS and C.
Thanks, everybody. I really do like to do it when we have standing room only in the place. So it's nice that we have a lot of interest. And since I've read all of your notes and most of your reports over the last 30 years, I think I'm well situated to be able to talk about SS and C and where we're going and what we're doing and why we think we're a great investment and why we think you should think that way too. For one thing, this is what you should stay on the one that I'm on.
So I've been around in the Grand Ole Men, 1986. We're getting close to 25,000 employees, and it's a big place. But we have a lot of good people with really, really top talent, and you're going to meet a bunch of them today. We also are a very global organization with offices from Bangkok and Sydney and Melbourne to Durgaon and Mumbai and across Europe and across North America and with Eze and Intralinks in South America. So we are able to sell our products and services around the world, And that really provides a level of consistency and diversification that is really pretty unrivaled at the size of company we are.
We've been public since 2010. Prior to that, from 2,005 until 2010, we were private with Carlisle. You know, we learned everything Carlisle could teach us, I think, which is a really good thing. And then from 'ninety six to 2,005, we were public. So we went private in a $1,000,000,000 transaction in 2,005, and we went public as at $7.50 a share.
And while we have had some softness in our stock price over the last few weeks, I think yesterday it closed at about $47 or something like that. So I know it's in your portfolios, it may not be one of the better performers, but in my portfolio, it happens to be the best performer. We also have lots of products and services, over 100 and we have over 13,000 clients. No client of ours represents more than 3% of our revenue, which gives us a pretty good risk profile as far as concentration in any particular client. And we also have literally over 130 offices around the world.
Now again, everyone is concerned about growth and in particular, organic growth. Of course, we went public in 2010, we did $329,000,000 in revenue. We estimated currently in 2018, we're going to do $3,476,000,000 in revenue. I know you all can do arithmetic, but that's 10x from 2010. We've also done a number of acquisitions, as you can see under each one of the years.
And increasingly, we get higher and higher quality acquisitions with top, top management that you'll hear from today, whether it's Rob Rowley from Advent or Leaf O'Leary from Intralinks or Jeff Shoreman from EZ or Mike Sleightholm from Citi. There's just a bunch of very talented people that we've been able to acquire and then give them increasing responsibility and increasing ability. We also think that we're not Amazon. We got to have earnings. We like earnings, we like cash, right?
So since 2010, we've had a 34% compound annual growth rate in our net income. Once again, I realize for your portfolios, I might not be even be in the 4th quartile, but it's still worked out pretty well here. Now we also have a lot of places that we sell into, whether you're a family office, you're pension, you're an insurance company, you're a large scale asset manager, you're a hedge fund, any type of hedge fund, whether you're a stat arb or Global Macro or you're Long Short, we do 7,000 of them or so. And again, we're one of the I think we're the largest provider of fund administration services to the private equity world. You'll talk to Birgish Malde today.
He'll talk to you about real assets, but he's going quite rapidly. So there's just all these things that we have. Ken Fullerton, who came in from GlobeOp, is running our hedge business, which is growing nicely for us. And again, as you look at across the different industries that we service, right, our alternatives business, which everyone's nervous about, I mean, for the last 2 or 3 years, I thought the hedge fund industry was going out of business. Awful lot of spark people in that business to all go out of business.
And every time I met with them, I asked them, I said, is your firm going to go out of business? He said, oh, no, no, we're going to outperform. Once you're all going to outperform, it's pretty likely that you're going to stay in business. And that's kind of what's happened. So the all the concern about the demise of the hedge fund industry is a little bit premature, I think, and the knowledge and capability of that group of people to innovate and be able to come out with new products and services that large scale investors want is been pretty unrivaled for about the last 20 years.
We also now have a 12% of our revenue is going to come in from healthcare. I know that's another reason to be nervous, but it's once again the fastest growing part of DST. It's something that we're getting our arms around. We've got some very talented managers in there and will talk about that, Mike Slitholm. Jonathan Baines, who runs that business for us, and Ellen Dunne Duffield, who works in that business, and Mark Palmer, very talented people.
And we're really excited about what our opportunities are. And wealth management, you've talked to Rob Rowley from Adpant that has the Black Diamond product, Steve Levent's here that you'll be able to talk to who runs that business for us down in Jacksonville. We just have these very high quality businesses that generate tremendous cash flow. I think we have 96% recurring revenue. So it just really is a very strong, very sticky.
Now, you might also decide, kind of like the hedge fund industry, that all the taxing authorities are going to go away. What do you think? So we do thousands and thousands of tax returns, right? And we don't do them for free. We do a lot of things for regulatory.
You get a chance to talk to Mike McGaugh, right, he started our regulatory services business. I think right now he's up to 753 clients, over $2,000,000,000,000 in assets that we're doing regulatory reporting on. That's not going away either. Oh, yeah, the SEC has decided. We're all so honest.
They don't need to be around anymore. And I don't think that's very likely that that's going to happen. So it's things like foreign and GDPR and EMER and 52 other things that come at you, right? Come at you, You're the ones that are regulated. We're the ones that help you do that stuff.
And you don't have to use us, but we do it fast, we do it efficient, we have experts, we have scale. And if you do it yourself, you find out you don't have enough expertise, you don't have scale, right? It's something that you really love to do, fill out forms for government, right? That's really what portfolio managers and traders and analysts I know really like to do. So it again is something that we are able to provide and it's been a very good source of increasing relationship with our clients and our ability to drive revenue and drive earnings.
The financial services industry is a pretty big vertical for us, and they spend lots of money, as you can see at on the banking and securities industry, the worldwide spend on technology expected for 2020 is over $300,000,000,000 That's a lot of money. And there's also an awful lot of people that are trying SaaS for the first time. And, you know, there's a lot of SaaS that's not multi tenant. Some large scale players want single tenant, but still SaaS, right? They're still getting it through the cloud, whether it's a private cloud or a public cloud.
There's a lot of scalability that you get to that. And towards the end of the day, you'll get a demonstration of our Singularity program that Norm Bollinger, our Vice Chairman, is going to lead. And I think you'll see what we're doing. That the $252,000,000 in R and D that we've spent so far and on a run rate basis, we're at about $420,000,000 in R and D. We don't think we're throwing it all away, right?
We think we've got some great stuff coming down the pike that people aren't going to be able to keep up with. And we look forward to that challenge. You know, when I started this place in my basement in 1986, we didn't have any of these numbers. We had a telephone. And I would call these people, but they wouldn't often hire me.
So now we've come a long way in 30 years. And $45,000,000,000,000 that's a lot of money. That's a lot of zeros. And same thing is that you think about the largest asset managers in the world. They all use us.
Prime brokers only 9 out of 10. You think you would like to be part of that 9 or maybe that 10th? I suggest the 9% know what they're doing. Same thing on the issuance of commercial paper. You don't get to 99% if you don't know what you're doing.
And Tom McMacken is here, and he built that business with open information systems that we bought in 2,005, September. And as Tom will tell you, it's the highest price I ever paid for something. He got it. But we were against SunGard, and we had to win. He also set that up.
We also structured 95 percent of all the municipal bonds issued in the United States structured on our software. So again, as you look at it, 58,000,000 transfer agency accounts, I think we have something like 51,000,000 sub accounts. So it's a big business with a lot of data, a lot of information. And Steve Miao, who runs our distribution and marketing data analytics business, you know, has really got some great opportunities for us around the world. And we've really accelerated some of the stuff that we got when we acquired DST.
So we're able to take advantage of all this talent that we got and this ability to penetrate. So we're already selling all the top 20 managers in the U. S, and we've had a lot of interest in Europe. And so we've accelerated going into Europe by about a year, I think, is what we've done. So instead of doing it in the Q1 of 2020, we're going to do it in the Q4 of 2018.
That's a lot different. That's SS and C on the gas pedal, not SS and C on the brake, right? So that's how we try to operate, and that's why we've been able to have the results we've had. Again, we got wiser. You know, we only sold software, you know, back in the beginning.
But the largest software license we ever sold was to MetLife and Mark Zimmerman, who came back to work for us about 7, 8 months ago and is leading the sales and marketing side on Singularity with Scott Kerlin, he sold it to MetLife. I think it was $4,600,000 we sold, and that was like 1998. Now we have customers who pay us $100,000,000 You know know how much maintenance we'd have to give out of MetLife to get to $100,000,000 You guys got it, right? 95,400,000 dollars So it's again, that's very hard to be able to drive $100,000,000 revenue stream just on software licenses. So we got smarter, we started doing hosting services.
And AWS and Microsoft Azure, I guess, and all this other stuff that's out there. Come on, we're a vertical software services capability firm, right? We understand what a good price is and a bad price. We know what a mortgage backed factor is. We know what an FX rate is.
We know how many digits that you have to take each one of these in order to be able to have an accurate NAV. None of those other guys have. They're asked from 3rd base when it comes to this. You know, again, expertise is very important in what we do because we service people like you, high IQ, low patients. Actually, I've changed that, high IQ, no patients, right?
So you have to be able to deliver accurate information and do it the first time, right? Now, look, we're not perfect. We make mistakes, right? But we don't get to make many. And as I try to tell our clients, we'll make a lot less than you would, but that doesn't really go over so big.
So we just can't. We're set to a standard that is almost perfection. And we've worked very hard on being able to do that, mostly by taking over more and more of the functions. You know, if you're unwilling to invest the money to keep that system running the way it's supposed to run, you're going to have mistakes. I mean, I've been to clients and I said, well, where's your server?
You know, they opens up the coat rack, there's this little PC, and they're going, that's your server. I had another client say, yeah, you know, we don't know if we're as disciplined as I'm the CEO of the I'm the CEO of the place. I can't start laughing. I can't start crying either. But I told him, I said, still boots up.
So, again, realizing that that's what the industry is, right? Everybody wants to go trade. Everybody wants to go analyze. Everybody wants to create the portfolio. But somebody's got to do the shoveling and the bricklaying and all the stuff that requires to get that information to you on time and accurate and that you have confidence.
You start getting a holdings report every morning or look at your screen and you don't believe it. Do I really own 22,000 shares? I thought I sold 7. Let's see, 22, I'm assuming it'd be 15. Do I own 15?
Do I own 22? I don't know. Sell it all, see if you got a short. That doesn't make people comfortable, right? So it's really important to be accurate.
And it's really important to know what a short is, right? It's really important to know those types of things, details. The only way you get people to know those details is you hire experts. And we have experts throughout SS and C, CPAs, CFAs, MBAs, chartered accountants, all over the place, mathematicians, actuaries, you know, not so good at cocktail parties, but pretty good at staying in balance, you know. And you also have to pay people well.
You have to train them. You have to have high expectations. You got to believe that they can do it, and then they have to do it. Can't talk about it, You know how much money we get on a letter of intent for revenue? We get 0.
You know how important we think letters of intent are? Just above 0, right? We get it when we get contracts, when we start working and doing the work, and that's what we focus on. And I think that's something where people have been able to participate in how SS and T operates. So as just last week or the week before, we just granted options to about half the workforce.
At DST, we granted options to 6,900 people out of the 14,000 employees they had when we acquired them and say 13,000 that they have now. So again, about half the workforce, a little bit higher. We've done that at GlobeOp. We did that at Advent, right? We did it at Portia.
You know, the same thing, right, the focus on taking care of the people, making sure we're all in the same boat, we're all rowing the same way. You know, there's not things going to stop us. You know, somebody asked me, what's going to happen 5 years from now? Go back to those 10 year charts, add another 5. You can go back 20 years.
That's what we're going to do. We're going to execute. And we're going to get bigger and stronger. And then our competitors are going to go, uncle, what would you pay me for my business? That's usually what happens.
We also were very flat, right? So people like Christy Bremner, who came from Thomson Reuters with the part with the Porsche acquisition, you know, or Mike Slightholm, who came with the Citi acquisition, they understand what it means to, okay, so make a decision. Vigesh Malady from Stage Tree, You know, we're we're just not very bureaucratic. You know, you started asking me, I mean, I'm at DST, they're asking, what are you going to do about the switch from active to passive in the mutual fund industry? I don't know.
Hired you, didn't I? You're supposed to figure that out. So get on with it, right? You have to ask me. Are you kidding me?
I'm an old timer. So again, it's driving the business, thinking about how you accomplish. I think about, gosh, this could be bad. What are we going to do? We're going to win.
That's what we're going to do. We're going to figure out what people want. We're going to build it. We're going to deliver it. And we're going to deliver it better than Bank of New York.
We're going to deliver it better than State Street. We're going to deliver it better than JPMorgan, better than Citco, better than everybody else. And that's what you'll see throughout today, why we win, because that's what is important to what happens to performance, what happens to earnings, what happens to cash flow, how you retain talent, right? So it's something that's very much embedded in our culture. How are we going to do this overall?
New products and services? When Norm talks to you about singularity, right? We have tremendous interest. It's how do you take advantage, right? Jeff Shoreman will talk to you about Eclipse, another tremendous interest, 56 signed contracts already, tremendous amounts of implied revenue.
We're getting Jeff off of implied revenue, but we don't count implied revenue. It's I asked Patrick to give us a new line item, but it didn't work out, And we have an opportunity to drive health care. When we got into fund administration, everybody told you you're crazy, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Citco, UBS, how can you compete against them? Well, 16 years later, we're at about a $1,000,000,000,000 and at least half of those are out of the business. So if you think we're quaking because we're going to have to go compete against the likes of Aetna, oh, my God, Signum.
What scares me when I hear it, a big insurance company, we'll be okay. How come? Because we move faster, right? We don't have 42 meetings. We have 2 or 3.
I'm going to try to ask hard questions, try to get good answers, but we're in a hurry. You can't sit there and wait, you got to go. And I think that's something that we've done pretty well. And same thing on acquisitions. Oh my God, the risk, how are you going to integrate DST and Eze and Intralinks?
What are you talking about? We bought good companies with real products and real services and real talented management teams, right? They're going to get all of the capabilities that we have, and we're going to listen to them, right? So, oh, my goodness, we only beat by $0.07 the Q1 that we owned DSD. We only beat by $0.14 the 2nd quarter we owned DSD.
And now you're in the 3rd quarter. It could be risky. Could be risky. I don't really think so, but it could be. We also have all kinds of opportunities for tuck ins.
The number of people that call us and say they could help us with this widget or that widget that cost $5,000,000 $10,000,000 $15,000,000 $50,000,000 dollars 100,000,000 they don't all cost $5,500,000,000 or $1,500,000,000 but you get a lot of talent at $5,500,000,000 and 1,500,000,000 and this is an IP business. IP means intellectual property, for those of you that didn't know, and that takes IQ to build intellectual property that anybody wants to buy. You can build a lot of intellectual property that's not worth a damn, but you have to get stuff that people want to buy. And so far, we can't sell to ourself, right? So it doesn't do us any good to go after ourselves.
We have a pro form a spend in 2018, which includes the amount of money that Leaf spent in Intralinks and what Jeff spent in it as and what DST would be for a whole year of $420,000,000 I can assure you, I think that's my money. So we're not throwing it away on purpose. Doesn't mean we're not throwing any of it away, but we're not throwing it away on purpose. And as you'll see with what Norm shows you and what Jeff shows you and a number of other people Christy shows you, there's a lot of stuff that we're doing that we're building services and products and capability that I think is pretty exciting. And you can see across the whole span of 7, 8 years that the number of things that we've done that we're driving, that we're going to continue to drive.
The capabilities that we've gotten with these acquisitions is really unrivaled, the expertise, the capabilities, the breadth, the depth, you know, and I think it's going to continue. Joe Frank's here, who's running our mergers and acquisitions, our Chief Legal Officer, the number of incoming from the different banks, the number of properties that are coming for sale is as rich as at any time that we've been at this. So we're not going to run out of opportunities. But we don't just do acquisitions because I want to get bigger. We do it because that's what our clients want and that's what increases client satisfaction.
One more before you come. You can see again on a couple of the things that we've done, how we've been able to change the margins. And we're going to continue to be able to do that. Same thing with just recently with DST and what we expect and what we expect out of both ESS and Intralinks. So we're excited about what we're doing.
We're excited about where we're going. We appreciate all the support that you've given us. We understand that you have lots of opportunities to invest in lots of things. We think we're one of the good things. And I'm going to turn it over to Rahul, I think.
So I think if you look at us and what we do from a products and services standpoint, we think we've put together the most complete front, middle and back office set of products and services in the world, right? So whether it is at the time of trade initiation and you're trying to figure out what you're going to buy and how it fits into your portfolio and you're perhaps you're using our Advent Genesis product or 1 of Eze's products or you're going through to trade execution and you're using one of our order management systems or you need somebody to help you settle and perhaps you're looking for an outsourced middle office or an outsourced back office or it goes the whole way through the NAV production process or you're looking for advanced analytics and predictive analytics on where to go next and what the exposure issues are or risk or just about any other high value thing that you're doing in that investment process, we can do for you. That makes us pretty unique relative to most of the folks that we compete against who address parts of it but not all of it, which is why most of the places we go into, they're already using 2 or more of our products, in some cases, lots more.
And when we put together solutions, we're putting together integrated solutions that go across this entire spectrum. The other big difference between what we do and what most other people do is we do it both with software and with services, right? So when we're competing against a software company, they can deploy on prem, they can deploy in the cloud, they can't do it for you. They can't sign up for a service level agreement and say, hey, you know what, you're looking for this to happen on this day, that's our service level commitment, that's our deliverable, we're going to get it to The flip side of that is when we're competing against an outsourced company, they're generally using our technology or somebody else's technology. They don't have access to the source code.
They don't have the breadth of integration that we do and makes it pretty different and it makes it pretty compelling from a sales standpoint. So if you take a really complicated problem, you can generally come up with a really complicated solution. But if you're really, really smart and you have lots of expertise, you can figure out how to make it simpler. That's what we're trying to do. Most of the places we go into, they have grown, they have lots of different asset classes.
Over time, they've bought lots of different systems to keep up with those asset classes, whether it's here's my mortgage backed system or here's my high volume equities trading system, and then it all comes together, and I've got several different applications that monitor and settle and keep track of it. So we were in one over the last few weeks that's a pretty big prospect for us, a client that came to us from DST, and they were showing us their architecture, and they've got 55 applications. And what we did was we showed them a transformed architecture where they have 7 applications, right? They keep the 7 they really like, the portfolio managers continue to trade the way they want to, Everything else is replaced by our stack, which is message linked, it's real time, it's dramatically different than what they have today. They get the benefit of really much newer technology and also the work that we're doing in artificial intelligence and robotic process automation and machine learning, which we view to be transformational, right?
And so that's what we're trying to do all over the place. Now these are great big organizations, right? And you can't get them all to move at the pace you want to,
but we're
pretty optimistic about our opportunity. It's also modular. It's modular, it's configurable, it's flexible. What that really means is you don't have to rip out your entire infrastructure to use us. You can decide that what you really have is a pinpoint with collateral management.
Maybe you're trading derivatives for the first time, maybe you're doing a lot more credit default swaps than you've ever done before, you need some help with settling bank loans or doing covenant compliance on our CLO or whatever it is, right? And that's where that collection expertise that Bill talked about comes in really handy because the people sitting across from them are people that have been in those jobs and those kinds of organizations and can help them. And so we get to go in there, we get to perform a service, 2 services, 3 services, we get to show them how it all links together. And over time, that's a very big growth opportunity from us from the 13,000 plus customers we already have. It's also scalable, right?
And scalable for a customer just means that wherever you go, we can help you, right? Whether that's you're going to go into a new geography or if you're a New York based hedge fund, then you send us 6,000,000 trades a day and we've got to load, we've got to reconcile, we've got to monitor settlement, we've got to deliver day end reporting and we got to be ready for $6,000,000 the next day, right? And those are the kinds of things that we do. It does come down to execution. It comes down to focus.
It comes down to attention to detail. So we've got a great product set. We've got a lot of capability. We have Sys, they took them through an acquisition done a lot to improve that margin, 900 basis points. And we've also, much more importantly than that, we've used their capability, spread it through our products and services in our business.
So we have deep product expertise that came from GlobeOp. We've got deep fixed income capability that came from GlobeOp. And we've used that to spread. And Ken Florton, who runs our hedge business, and his team has been instrumental in our hedge business, and his team has been instrumental in growing that business. So we have in fund administration, right after we bought GlobeOp, we had 425 $1,000,000,000 in assets under administration.
Today, it's a $1,000,000,000,000 And if you're sitting at a prospect and they're talking to one of our competitors, they might say one of our competitors might say, yes, but they acquired it all, right? So we acquired 600, 700 Citi. We had people that had averaged 19, 20 years and they were running small parts of Citi. And what we thought we could do is take that and turn it into them running bigger parts of our business, right? So we won one of the biggest mandates awarded this year with $30,000,000,000 hedge fund, very great, combined technology presented in a way to the customer that they can appreciate, whether that's through cloud, whether that's through mobility, whether that's through alerts, whatever it is that they however they want to get it.
And we get to turn that into a bigger pipeline. And think before that, maybe 500, 600 people had equity, pretty different. And in terms of creating that culture of ownership and hey, we're all working for the same thing, right, and our interests are aligned with our shareholders. That's what we're trying to do. So Jeff Shoreman is going to be here, and he's going to talk to you about as is important for us in lots of different ways, but one of those ways is in our hedge fund business.
Thank you, Rahul. I'm going to focus on, I think, 4 major topics. 1 is our business model, how we generate growth in revenue, earnings and cash flow and then talk a little bit about our revenue and what the pricing model is, high margin business model. It's been driven by and our software technology businesses. And then at the same time, we've integrated acquisitions.
We've acquired acquisitions, but we view fair value that generate large returns for our shareholders. And in those acquisitions, we focus on cost controls and improving efficiency. So if you look at recently, what we've been able to do, I think a good example, through this whole period, we've done several large acquisitions where I will improve margins on. But one good example is a recent acquisition of DST. So we've announced that we've implemented about $200,000,000 of annual run rate synergies at DST through September, the target we set of $175,000,000 In addition, we raised our target for the near term on DST somewhere around the high teens, low 20s to 34% in the Q3.
So that's generally how we look at margins and get our whole business up to what traditionally we view as fully acquired businesses through using debt and being very careful where we use our equity. So we've been able to drive earnings about 25% over the last year on an annual basis. We've done that through organic growth, maintaining the core margins in our core business, acquiring acquisitions, generating synergies in those acquisitions and then delevering our business once we complete those acquisitions. If you look at this year, at the midpoint of our guidance, we're expecting about 103 percent, dollars 385,000,000 for our dividend or business margins. And we should be somewhere around 3.9x to 4x leverage at the end of 2019 and then probably by mid-twenty, be it 3.5, somewhere around there, leverage.
So be it a comfortable leverage point by mid-twenty 20. A little bit about revenue. Ex foreign FX exposure in our business, the vast majority of our business is in U. S. Dollars.
The largest exposure is the British pound, which is about 11%. And these numbers are LTM, so it's not with DST for a full 12 months. I think with DST for a full 12 month, the British pound maybe goes to about 14% of our total revenues. So still not very significant. And again, most of our revenue is generated in the U.
S. I'll talk a little bit about our revenue streams and the stability of the revenue streams in various economic environments, talk a little bit about pricing in our alternatives business, which is about 33% of our revenue today. As you know, it's priced assets under management. It's got minimums and in some cases, fixed fees for services. That revenue tends to be fairly stable.
We don't see large changes in the assets under administration at our clients since most of them are hedge funds and private equity funds and private equity funds hate to mark down their investments. So we've got pretty good stability in that business, and we don't see a lot of fluctuations with the market cycles going up or down. Our DST Transfer Agency business is priced by number of counts and number of transactions. Also, that business tends to be very stable on a quarterly basis and on an annual basis. And the remaining of our business is and that tends to be multiyear contracts with annual price increases at the end of those contracts.
And in all these businesses, we've got very high retention rates. Over the last 12 months, if you measure retention rates on a revenue basis, we've had about 95% retention over the last 12 months. We have very high retention, very sticky business. And if you look at our track record during some of the financial the last major financial crisis, we DSR revenue went from $280,000,000 to $270,000,000 from $2008,000,000 to $209,000,000 We did do a little acquisition in there. So sometimes those economic environments give us the opportunity to buy acquisitions at really low prices.
The Advair business was actually growing during that period, and the DST business performed strongly during that last economic environment. So I think the key here is these are mission critical systems. Really, customers cannot terminate the contracts through an economic crisis they're required to run their businesses, and we typically see above 90% retention rates even in severe economic environments. And we see a lot of stability in our business, and we're able to maintain our margins. I think we'll take questions.
We're going to open it up to about 15, 20 minutes of audience questions with Bill, Rahul and Patrick. And then recess for a short break before the second half of the presentation.
Thank you. Alex Kramm, UBS. Bill, I'm going to start with your most favorite topic, organic growth. A lot of well, you already highlighted a few things here. But on the earnings call a couple of weeks ago, made this I don't know if it was an
off the
cuff comment that you think the business as it stands now should be 5% grower organically. So maybe you can just flush it out a little bit more in terms of what the puts and takes are. Does it mean DSTS to get to a certain acceleration from what it was growing on its own? What kind of environment does it entail? So what are the biggest factors?
And how did you come up with the 5% and how comfortable are you with it?
Well, I think traditionally, we've tried to be at between 5% to 10% for organic growth, but obviously 5% is at the very low end of that growth range. DST, we're just now getting into trying to get the sales force into a sales culture and be able to hire some senior sales leadership into DST. And I think Mike Slightholm can talk to you about that for a little bit. We've seen a lot of strength in both Rob Rowley's business and Christy Bremner's. And so we have a lot of things that we think going on.
And Norm will talk to you a little bit about Singularity, which we think is also going to give us some uplift. We're a big place now, right? So in 2018, we'll probably end the year at right around $3,500,000,000 in revenue. And next year will be at something like $4,500,000,000 in revenue. So on an organic revenue growth basis at $4,500,000,000 into 2020, obviously.
But that's $225,000,000 in sales on its own, and that would be with 100% retention. So at 95% retention, that means we've got to do $450,000,000 rather than $225,000,000 So we're not trying to set small goals, but in several of our businesses, we are dominated. And so we have full pipelines with very big clients, which gives us the opportunity, right, to be able to drive revenue on an organic basis. And at the same time, as we've said before, is that we're not going to get too hung up on what all of you want versus us going picking up diamonds that we see on the ground. We're going to go pick all the diamonds up, right, and then make sure that we drive our earnings and drive our cash flow and pay down our debt.
And so if I had to pick the first three things that we have to do is you got to drive cash flow, you got to pay down debt, and you got to drive earnings, and then you got to drive revenue growth. So revenue growth is important, and I don't want to not act like it's not, but I can have all the revenue growth in the world. If I don't get any earnings on it, if I don't get any cash flow on it, then it doesn't mean anything to us other than how come your leverage is staying at about 4.7%. So we really do think that we have the best team. We have the smartest people, we have the most capability.
We need to get some more sales horses into DST and a more of a sales culture, And that takes a little bit while. You got to hire people, you got to train them, you got to incent them. People got to get incented correctly. So I think those are the types of steps we're going to take, and I think that's why I think we have a shot at growing at 5%.
Jackson Ader at JPMorgan. Bill, first for you. You've mentioned before that there's been some inbound interest in the health care piece from DSD. Any update on that?
It remains. New ones have come in as well, and the old ones are hanging around the goal, thinking of seeing if we're going to not retain it. But right now, we have no intention of not retaining it. We think it's a you know, it's one of the fastest growing areas in the United States and around the world for that matter. And we have some technological advantages.
You know, we're not we're not our we're not doctors, we're not medical doctors and we're not pharmacists. But we have an exclusive relationship with Johns Hopkins. So we're able to take a bunch of their formularies and other things that they give us and be able to then drive that into the marketplace. And we think we have a number of things that help on outcomes, which if you read anything about the health care industry, that's what everyone's trying to do is improve outcomes, whether it's diabetes or it's mental health or it's orthopedics or any of the other things, right? It's how can you do things better, faster, cheaper?
And that's what the entire that's the JPMorgan, Berkshire Hathaway and Amazon thing. I would say that each one of those organizations is quite a bit more political than we are. And then if you triple it, I bet it's very bureaucratic.
Okay.
And then a quick follow-up for you, Rahul. You mentioned that Intralinks, okay, you have to identify some of the accounts that make the most sense to bring over maybe some of your outsourcing or administration businesses into Intralinks customers. Have you identified some of those or just give us a sense of what type of account makes the most sense?
Yes. So look, 1, we haven't closed yet, right? So obviously, while we've started to work on integration, only so much we can do in that process. That said, Intralinks has tens, if not hundreds of private equity customers, including some at the very largest end of the scale, and we think they're all prospects for us, right? So the ones that we're already, let's say, serving in overlap, we've got an opportunity because we're now more strategic to do more with them.
And there's plenty of new ones that we can go after.
Good morning. Andrew Schmidt from Citi. Thank you for the presentation so far. A quick question on the Alternative segment. I'm wondering if we could just break down the various components, hedge funds, private equity, real assets.
Talk about the health of those end markets and then correspondingly, and we'll probably talk about this in a little bit, but where are the product opportunities for organic growth there, if you don't mind?
Sure. So roughly $1,000,000,000 business a year roughly, right? The hedge fund portion of that is about 650,000,000 dollars right? So once again, let's just kind of some of what Bill was saying earlier about the doomsday of the hedge fund industry, right? $350,000,000 is not connected to AUA, right?
For the most part, what Joe Padalero does and what Pakesh does is linked to services that we provide. And there are other volume metrics in there, deals and things like that, but not AUA, right? So it's really the hedge fund industry. I think if you kind of look at the organic growth opportunities across all three, which is your question, that private equity industry, there's a lot of greenfield left. Half, if not more than half, still do it themselves.
Some percentage of that come into the market every year. When they come into the market, they try with 1, 2, 3, perhaps their latest funds. And as we get into that, and Joe will be able to give you some examples, we can grow from there, right? So that's been growing really nicely for us, 8%, 9% a year, and we expect that to continue. But gas is just getting started on the real asset side, right?
And there were that's probably not even as outsourced as the private equity industry is. So if you've got a real estate partnership or an infrastructure fund or something like that, we've got a great system for you and a great set of experts for you, and so that's growing much faster. And then in the hedge fund industry, we've got several different opportunities. One is the competitive takeaway process. There's a percentage of the a pretty significant percentage of the industry that's still at banks and custodians, and they're not really getting the technology innovation and the satisfaction that they're looking for.
So most of the big wins that are conversions are coming from that stream, whether with somebody, it's not working. Our framework to help size the opportunity from revenue perspective, from just cross selling revenue synergies, etcetera, from DST?
Well, I think that I was with one of our biggest DST customers, just last week, and he said that I was telling him we're going to spend about $400,000,000 on R and D. He says, well, not including you guys, we're going to spend $800,000,000 right? So our ability to get into that $800,000,000 is greatly enhanced with how we go after the market, right? We had an opportunity that we closed this quarter, Q3. It wasn't that big of a deal, but it's $500,000 and it was an AWD license, I think.
And the salesperson on it, we told her, she says, well she said, I think it's the Q2 of 2019. We said, how about Q3 2018? I just think that's pretty fast. Why don't you ask them? You know what?
Why don't you call them up and ask them and, you know, see if we get in front of them and see what they say? So she did, and they they bought. And it was like a light going on. Like, wow, I really didn't have to wait until June of 'nineteen. I could get it done in September of 'eighteen.
She gets paid, They get a better system. So there's a lot of that stuff all over DST. And I think when Mike makes his presentation, you'll see as he goes through it, you know, the opportunities and what he's doing and the people we're hiring, you know, senior solid people that we have high expectations, right? Very high expectations. But they're very talented.
You know, you don't hire Babe Ruth to pitch, unless you're the Red Sox. You know, truly, right? I mean, he gets up every day and hits home runs. And so it's the same thing. And I think it's changing a culture and doing it in a very humane way, very thoughtful and trying to take care of people in the right way so that we don't come off as Genghis Khan and this gang of cutthroats, because that's really not how we are.
At the same time, you've got a job. I expect you to do your job and I expect you to know your job. And I don't expect you to come whining to me about active versus passive. Okay, we know it already. Let's get on with it.
So I'll go into the wallow room and wallow, right? So that's something that we're trying to change. And that is constant. That is every day, that is every message, that's the same way and it's done intently.
Thanks again for the presentation. And sorry, this is Ashish from Deutsche Bank. And Rahul, thanks for the clarification on the alternative side. My question was more focused on the hedge fund. If you could provide some more details around your hedge fund exposure, how much is long short versus credit funds.
One of the concerns is that we may see elevated level of redemptions or liquidations. And Patrick obviously talked about revenues being really stable even during the down markets, but I was just wondering if you could provide some more clarity around that. And have you seen what have you seen among your client base? Yes. So I think we obviously look at this data, we published some indexes and we have at any point in time what the notices are and so on and so forth.
We're not really seeing anything that's particularly concerning for us. 1, this is a pretty diverse business. If anything, we tend to be concentrated in the more complicated assets, right? So we've got a lot of private credit, we've got a lot of distressed, we've got a lot of high yield, we've got a lot of complex derivatives, we've got FX strategies, we've got emerging markets, we've got just about everything, right? And we have long short equity, right?
And then where we have long short equity, we've got long and short, And we've got equity linked derivatives and contracts for difference and all kinds of things. So when you break it down, we think maybe 6%, 7% of our AUA is probably correlated to the S and P 500, right, which when you then step through a waterfall and you say what happens if this happens and then what's our incremental basis point yield on that change, it's really pretty small. Okay. No, that's helpful. And maybe just a quick follow-up question on earlier question about the cross sell.
Is there a way for you to quantify what percentage of the spend that clients have on software and services comes to SSNC? And some of your best clients, where does that come? So just how much more opportunity there is for you to capture more of the spend at your clients on your software and services? I think in general, we're a pretty small percentage of where they spend money, right? And as we get products and capabilities, we get to address more and more of those, but then we got to go win them.
Yes. If you took JPMorgan, for instance, I think their IT budget is about $10,000,000,000 and they pay us probably about 50,000,000 dollars So not insignificant to us, but not exactly at the top end of their $10,000,000,000 either. So there's just those kinds of opportunities literally all over the place. And again, it's long sales cycles. You got to get in there.
You got to be intent, right? And that's something that we think the biggest opportunity really with DST is to turn them a little less of a aircraft carrier and a little bit more of a destroyer, right? That's what we're trying to do.
Great. Can you guys hear me? Perfect. This is Brad Zelnick with Credit Suisse. Thanks for the presentation.
Bill, I wanted to ask you about how you're thinking about the current deal environment and the sustainability and perhaps constraints of your business model. We've seen you do 3 deals in pretty close succession to one another, all seem to be great opportunities for you. Can you handle 6 deals? Like are there constraints in terms of throughput, leverage? How do you think about the model and its ability to continue doing what it's done so successfully for so many years?
Well, again, we need to make sure that we retain, attract and retain talent, right? The great thing about Advent when we acquired them in July of 'fifteen is they had such a talented group of people with Rob Rowley and Steve Levent and Karen Geiger and Catherine Pierce and a whole group of others, right, that came to us and has really driven that business to its heights, right? And same thing what you'll find with Jeff Shoreman, you'll find he's pretty intent. Since you're a guy and as for 18 years, understands the business, like being CEO, I wouldn't give him my job, so I told him. But he's really capable and able to grow it.
He's going to see where when we were at $280,000,000 you go back to 2,008, right? So from 2,008 to 2018, we've gone from 2,880,000,000 to 280,000,000 and in 2019, we're going to do 4,500,000,000 dollars So how do you do that? Well, you get Leaf O'Leary or you get Joe Padallero or you get Ken Fullerton or you keep Tom McMacken, you Norm goes through a change to Vice Chairman, but he's really driving a very important part of our next gen technology, right? It's a people business. It's and I think what our people know is, is I'm interested.
I'm interested in what their name is. I'm interested in how they're doing. I'm interested to make sure that their life is okay. So, you know, hey, you know, the better your life is, the more work I could get out of you, you know. And I don't mean that so coldly, but it is true about everything.
You know, you've got to be as sensitive about how people are as you are about what you expect. You know, so, you know, and you've got to understand that everybody has trouble, everybody, every family, every community, every everything. So the challenge of running a big business is the same challenge as running a small business, motivating the people. People got to care. If they don't care, then the people that run the parts of the business that have people that don't care have to get rid of the people that don't care.
And I think that's what we'll do going forward. And I think it's going to be effective.
Appreciate it. I just have a quick follow-up for you, Rahul. SS and C has always done a great job taking advantage of technology innovation just available in the industry. You specifically mentioned robotic process automation, which is a hot topic. To what extent is that opportunity versus a threat that it cannibalizes and drives efficiency to back office processes more generally in financial services?
So a lot of these, one, we're pretty excited about the have expertise, right? So as we're looking at, and you'll see some of this expertise, right? So as we're looking at and you'll see some of this later, but as we're looking at the applications, we've got more people than do these jobs that require, whether it's deep reconciliation knowledge or deep how a swap gets settled or how collateral gets moved or whatever those other applications are. So we've got a number of these processes running within our organization now. We've looked at them side by side.
We think there's a lot of operating leverage to be had. There's also a lot of differentiation to be had from what we can do versus what competitors can do. Remember, most of our competitors aren't technology companies to begin with in the outsourcing businesses, right? So they don't really have hundreds of these processes running within their organizations that they can then test and use as a lab for new technologies. And then our software competitors, it works both ways.
We've got both sides of this. We can attack it really well, and we're pretty excited about it.
You go first in the back. Okay. Or you'll be next.
Thanks, Bill. One for Raul on Intralinks, and I know it hasn't closed yet, but you had the slide with the cross sell opportunities in the mix. I think there's a perception that the revenue from Intralinks is capital market sensitive and will be volatile depending on M and A activity. Should we be looking at this iGraph as a distribution of revenue, could you call it cross sell opportunities? And then how should we think about the stability of the revenue from the banks and the corporates?
Is that something that will rise and fall steeply with the capital markets with M and A? Or will it be more stable?
I think that the if you go back and you look at Intralinks' revenue history and you try to correlate that with what's happened in the M and A markets, you'll find Intralinks grows 8%, 9% a year and sort of grown 8%, 9% a year regardless. And then you say, how come? How can that be? But you got to remember, what they're doing is they're providing the data room and they're getting paid based on content, right? How many pages are consumed, etcetera.
And what happens when the M and A cycle slows down is those data rooms stay open longer, right? Deals don't close quite as fast, people spend more time in them and that also is a revenue stream, right? And then they've got lots of other things that they do in terms of secure workflows and things like that, that aren't as directly linked, including the fund communication, LP communication business I referenced. So I think we feel good about it regardless of what's happening with the M and A environment.
Okay. And then one for Patrick on the currency exposure. You mentioned 11% for the pound, maybe dials up to 14% when we sort of get a normalized level. On the expense side, are you kind of offset on that as far as the mix? And it seems like you also have a lot of expense in India where there's not necessarily revenue.
Just how do should we think about some of your currency exposures with offsets?
That's true. We're pretty much naturally hedged on the revenue on the currency because we've got similar cost structure as a percentage in those jurisdictions. And you're right, the only real cost exposure without any revenue is in India, but it's really not very significant. So if you look at the last quarter, I think we had about $2,000,000 $2,500,000 of FX on the revenue side, and we had a similar offsetting amount on the expense side.
So my question, I guess, is you guys brought up the popular concern, which is you're so good at cutting costs, but might you take it too far at some point? And so I guess the question might be, where do you think you're most aggressive as far as cost cutting either by type of initiative or maybe within a specific company you've acquired and help us scope the risk around that, that it creates something that you didn't expect?
Well, I mean, again, we're we only really generally implement what all these places have already decided they were going to do. They just didn't do it, right? We're not coming in there magic. It's not magic. From the time we started doing this, you go in and there'd be this list of 90 people that aren't performing that they want to get rid of and they just wouldn't.
And then we check and make sure that those are really the 90 people that we think are not performing. It's not just because somebody's personality is rubbing somebody the wrong way or something. And then we execute, right? So we're not going in with predetermined how many or what we're not we've gotten DST up to 34% margins. I would tell you that 95% above percentage of the clients that we meet with are impressed with the improvement in the service, right, because what happens is, is that you have the better person calling you back, the person who knows more what your issue is, right?
And so you resolve it quicker, you know. And that's really important because, none of us really like that. Well, your ticket number is 13,447. Please dial in, in 30 minutes. And then you dial in, in 30 minutes, and it says, please dial in, in 30 minutes again.
So that customer service part of this business is so important that we try to make sure increasingly expertise is on the point of attack. So we have never had a situation where we've lost the talent that it would require to be able to manage the business, right? So we're not arrogant about it. We're actually pretty humble about it. And at the same time, we're pretty focused.
When we bought DST, they had 7 people that had $1,000,000 signing authority, and they had another $50,000 that had $500,000 in signing authority. Now they got $5,000 in signing
authority. So do you think there's a part of the surface area of the cost cuts that presents the most risk that you would highlight or not really?
Well, and when you say surface area, what
Just across client facing people, project back office based people, real estate relocations, all of that, compliance, whatever it might be?
Yes, I think it's more to do about where's the talent, right? And then evaluating the talent, if somebody is pretty good at working on Fidelity, we think we got way more talent than Fidelity needs and somebody ought to move over to Wellington, where, wow, it looks like Fidelity and Wellington are really well staffed. Maybe we should move somebody over to Schroders or move somebody over to UBS or move somebody in other words, it is it's not checkers, it's chess, right? So you got to take your time, you got to study, you got to be there, you got to talk to them, you got to listen. And then you'll figure out pretty quick who's into it, who's not, who's got capability, who wants to who has some ambition.
So I mean, you've got to get those kinds of things together, right? And you can put every political correct name in the book, but if you don't get capability, it's not going to matter.
So I'd just add to that, Bill. Most of the opportunity in DSD for us has been things that have nothing to do with client service. So it really doesn't have to do with client delivery or client technology. It has much more to do with how they go about doing the things. Some of it is infrastructure, right?
Some of it is we bring a lot of capability to somebody like DST. So where they're paying vendors, we may already have that technology. And converting those vendors into our technology, it just went to 0, right, in terms of the cost. So there's a lot of that, and I think it will continue in that manner for a while.
So we're going to conclude the Q and A session for now, but there will be another opportunity at the end of the day for Q and A with everyone. We're going to take a short 15 minute break, so we can get ready for the next section and we'll see you guys all back here. Hi. If everyone could take their seats, and we'll get started on the second half of the day. All right.
Thank you. So this next hour and a
half or so, we're going
to be walking through each one of our business units or a lot of the business units and you'll hear from the people that run them. And then we will also have an overview of our product Singularity that you've heard a lot about already today and a demo of that product and then we'll open it up to Q and A again at the end. So with that, I will introduce Mike Slidholm, who is SVP and General Manager of our DST Systems.
Thanks, Justine, and good morning, everybody. So I thought what I'd do is give a quick overview of DST in terms of how we make money in the business and how we think of DST in of the acquisition. So the first thing in terms of the kind of services we provide, similar to what you've heard this morning around some of the other business units and so on, DST is really providing software as a service and services to clients across the Financial Services and Healthcare Industries. Increasingly, we're moving the business from its core of processing transactions, whether it be pharmacy claims or mutual fund raise and so on and so forth, to leveraging data and analytics to provide insights to customers. So beyond just operational excellence and also helping them with how do they improve sales, how do they identify trends in drug use and abuse, how do they tailor their distribution strategy, mutual funds and things like that.
The revenue streams are very stable. 95% plus is recurring. We tend to make our money on numbers of accounts, numbers of plan participants, number of paid claims. So we're pretty resilient when it comes to health care business, people are only getting older. They're using health care more.
So generally, we're in pretty good shape in terms of the core drivers of our business. The other thing to note about DST is if you look at the core sectors, I won't read through all the numbers, but we have scale and we have credibility in all of the markets that we do business in. We feel good that those are markets with good underlying fundamental growth opportunities. But we have deep, long standing relationships with customers, and we have a lot of expertise. I think it's really important when it comes to thinking about the growth potential that we've got in DST.
So I met with a lot of the customers. I was with a customer CEO about a month ago. They've been with DST for 45 years. DST has done a great job of building capabilities around shareholder record keeping and TA. That particular customer is looking for ways in which they can transfer more of their fixed middle and back office costs to variable.
And so we spent half a day with them last week talking about how we can do that with SS and C capabilities. That's an opportunity maybe that SS and C wouldn't have come across necessarily pre DST. And pre SS and C, DST wouldn't have had the capabilities to be able to play in that space at all. So I think there's some great complementary businesses, very little overlap with what we're doing in SS and C, but a lot of complementary capabilities and upsell and cross sell opportunity for us within DST. If I look at the Financial Services business, what we're seeing here is a continuation of what we've seen in our alts space across the mutual fund business, across retirement and a number of the other key sectors in which we do business.
And that's really clients continuing to be under expense pressure, looking for alternative ways in which they can run their operations, help to drive excellence operationally, help to drive costs down, move from fixed costs to variable costs. Very focused on the use of digital and mobile capabilities to drive end client engagement as they look to develop their business models. And as I mentioned before, data and analytics is critical. So in terms of opportunities for us, we see a lot of potential when it comes to providing more BPO, more outsourced services to our customers across the financial services space. We have a very strong pipeline in all of the key sectors, both operationally and from a technology perspective.
So a number of CEOs that I've spoken to over the last couple of months are running mutual fund companies that were set up 30 years ago. They're running big infrastructure, data centers and so on. Very interested in how they can move to more of a posted variable cost kind of a model. So we think there's some good opportunities for us there as well as in the operational side. Kind of things that we're focused on, some key areas that are driving growth in Financial Services.
Our AWD workflow platform, it's a big business for DST. It's been underpenetrated, I'd say, and undersold within DST, and we think there's some great opportunities to sell it into our Healthcare business more, for example. There's great opportunities to sell with other SS and C products and services. We recently just announced a deal where we combined AWD with our PrecisionLM loan servicing platform. We've just gone into a pilot with another customer that's a large health insurer with a combination of that benefits enrollment platform, BRICS, with AWD.
So we think there's some good opportunities there, and we think really we could get some great traction for AWD across industry sectors. There's also a lot of synergy. We use AWD ourselves to run our BPO operations. And as we invest in RPA, we have about 30 robots live currently in our mutual fund back office businesses. As we invest there to improve our own operations, there's a lot of cross sell synergy to our clients who are using remote software solutions and AWD itself.
So we're in the same business therein. By investing and getting better, faster, cheaper, we're able to create more opportunity to upsell those existing clients. Retirement, important area for us. We're seeing some good opportunities there for our traditional SaaS model, but increasingly it's BPO. So we've got some very large BPO opportunities as Retirement Plan.
Record keepers are looking for again for ways in which they can transform their operation. So we're expecting a good lift there. And generally, data and analytics across all of our business. You'll see our distribution services capability is on show outside. Wallet Share consortium in the U.
S. So all the largest asset managers in the U. S. Are using us for distribution analytics. And we're in the process of rolling out that capability into the U.
K. It's kind of like Bill was mentioning before. Initially, the plan was to do that somewhere towards the end of next year. We're just about to go live with the pilot this month in the U. K, and we've seen some very strong demand from our biggest clients for that capability over there.
And the final point I mentioned is which we've touched on a couple of times is really is driving more sales expertise into the Financial Services business. SS and C has a strong sales culture, DST didn't. There's a few people in the room, Bernie O'Connor is here somewhere, who is just about to join us as Chief Revenue Officer in that business, very seasoned professional, 30 years in the industry. We've just hired also Wade McDonald, who is ahead of our competitor in London. We've hired Jonathan Shapiro from a competitor here in the U.
S. And we've made 3 or 4 other key senior sales hires that I think are going to get us a real lift across all of our businesses in Financial Services. Finally, I'll spend a minute or 2 on the Healthcare business. And we do get asked about this one a lot. It's a little bit different from some of the other things that we do in SS and C, but it actually it's also very similar.
The core competencies, as Bill touched on, we're really we're not at the cure and patients. We are running infrastructure. We are running operations on behalf of risk takers, payers in the health care industry. And we're helping them to drive operational efficiency, compliance with CMS rules. We're helping them drive better outcomes for patients at the end consumer level, and we're helping them drive better financial outcomes for themselves using our operations, using our leading technology platforms and using our predictive analytics that help them to drive create better care plans that ultimately drive those other components.
This is a great market too, right? There's 120,000,000 people in the U. S. On Medicare and Medicaid combined. The population is only getting older.
People are only using more health care. Vast majority of health care spend takes place in the last sort of 5 years of life. So the demand for these services is not going away. $600,000,000,000 a year spent just in Medicaid and a lot of inefficiency, a lot of opportunity. So we think the expertise we have, the core competencies we have that we've built over the last 30 years developing solutions for clients across Financial Services are very applicable in the Healthcare business as well.
So we're actually very complementary business in an attractive overall market. Kind of things we're focused on, again, data and analytics, we're leveraging some of the capabilities that we've developed in Financial Services, starting to look at how we can use those in Healthcare, identifying mutual fund trends, not that different from identifying and analyzing trends in drug use, abuse and wastage, which is really key to a lot of our payer clients. Helping clients move to more innovative revenue models, whether it be value based payments, bundled health care solutions, a lot of operational complexity comes into these, so we've been building these into our core systems. Again, value based payments is a good example in the health care business scheduled to be rolled out Q3 of next year. We've accelerated that.
We're going live this quarter. So we've brought a focus to execution that's driving some real results in that business. Our pharmacy business, great business, very strong financials, very profitable, growing at a nice clip. Really focused on providing more value added solutions there to clients and increasing our overall revenue per pay claim. So we get paid per paid claim.
We did about $500,000,000 of them last year. Last couple of years when we started to accelerate this, we've increased our revenue per pay claim from about 0.43 to drive revenue growth. Again, final point, sales. Danny Del Maestro is here somewhere. We've just he's going to be joining us as Chief Revenue Officer in this business.
30 plus year industry vet, founded his own company very successfully, sold it to one of the big providers in the U. S. So a CEO who's joining us is really going to, I think, make a big difference in terms of getting the sales culture that we know in SS and C into this health care and pharmacy solution space that we have in DST. So we feel very optimistic about the growth there. I'll leave it there.
I'm going to hand to Ken Fullerton, who is SVP and Head of our Hedge Fund Services business.
Thank you, Mike. Again, my name is Ken Fullerton. I'm going to cover the hedge fund administration space. I oversee that. I've been with the organization since 2005.
I'm going to share with you some of the facts and figures at high level, talk about some of the key strengths, opportunities and some of the key initiatives in the group. So to begin with, we have over $1,600,000,000,000 in administration within S and C, closer to $1,700,000,000 as Rahul mentioned earlier. Of that, about $830,000,000,000 is related to hedge fund assets and strategies and structures. Of that, we have approximately 1500 unique clients, and we service approximately a little over 7,400 discrete funds. And that really covers a lot of the hedge fund type of structures and types commingled funds, bull funds, managed accounts, fund to funds, hybrid structures, etcetera.
As you can see over the last 18 months to 24 months, we've seen some nice increase in the number of funds on the platform from both existing and new clients, a little over 1700, like I mentioned. From a staffing perspective, we have over 400, 300 employees globally, located in 11 countries and approximately 30 offices providing 24x5 service coverage to our clients. So let's talk about a couple of strengths. The technology ownership, we feel and have seen the ability to use our own technology within the Fund Services Group has really enabled us to deploy technology solutions quickly. So we think it's a really distinct advantage, better advantage sellers.
The ability to be highly responsive and more nimble in responding to the ongoing changes from manager, investor, even the regulatory environment, service to benefit our clients greatly. And on technology, technology is the underpinning of our service offering. But as Bill mentioned, it's about the people too, right? So the diversity, the depth of the talent globally really enables us to offer our clients a wide variety of solutions and services across all products, all asset classes and all fund structures. From a global footprint perspective, as I mentioned, we have over 4,000 people globally, providing 24x5 solutions.
And I think the most important part of that as well and again to reference what Bill mentioned earlier, it's about the people, it's about the expertise. So geographically, as I mentioned, we're in 30 locations. And I think that what that really does for us is allows us to attract and retain talent and allows us to really offer highly customized, tailor made, follow the sun type of model for our clients that they derive the benefit of. In terms of and I'll skip some of the other ones, but in terms of opportunities, the Asia Pacific market, we've realized some significant growth over the last 3 to 5 years, anywhere in the range of 20% to 25% on a year over year basis in terms of AUA and revenue. And we're extremely bullish about that market.
That market still represents only 5% to 10 percent of the alternative assets. So we think that market will continue to grow and we're well positioned for that. From a managed account platform perspective, we continue to see growth of managed accounts on the platform. And I think what's driving that really is, as managers seek to attract and retain investor capital, they're forced to offer more highly customized solutions outside the historical commingled and pooled fund type of structures. So we really think that the managed account platforms will continue to grow and prosper.
And again, we're well positioned for that. In terms of asset allocated, this kind of correlates back to what I think what Rahul will say talking about the competitive takeaways. And what we've seen is really an increased interest in that space. So foundations, endowments, family offices, pension funds, and then they're really trying to grapple and solve for the endemic problem that's existed. And that's predominantly within custodians and the banks where, and I'll just look to the next chart, which really kind of speaks to some of the key initiatives that we're working on.
And the what and it really applies to managed account platform providers as well, which is the struggle inability to integrate data from a multitude of different types of providers, administrators, accounting platforms, custodians, funds, etcetera. And within S and C, we've been able to deploy a systematic solution to integrate, assimilate and provide really a consolidated single source of data to managed account platform sponsors and asset allocators, as well as provide the ability to perform performance measurement, risk management on that data as well. Rahul also mentioned some of the MBO opportunities here. So in addition to the historically standard type of fund admin mandates, shadow NAV, NAV light type of things that you've heard about, There's also an increasing interest and trend in management looking for more of the bespoke type of solutions centered around some of the core operational processes, reconciliation, collateral management, valuation control, loan servicing and technology solutions as well. And I think as managers confront the dilemma of fixed pricing versus variable pricing, quicker to market as they hire and go into new products and strategies, the interest and the desire to use someone like an SNC is there for them to do that and take advantage of those opportunities quickly.
And again, on technology, I'm not spend too much time here because I know Norm and you'll be covering what we're doing from an AI perspective. But I will say already the application of AI, RPA within the operations and things like reconciliation, document management, wire processing is already yielding significant benefits in terms of efficiency, risk mitigation. And as Rahul said, we're quite excited about what that means for us as we go forward and apply AI to even greater and more broadly within the organization. So it's again a little high level overview of the business, things we're focusing on, things that we feel are really our competitive advantage and differentiates. And next up is Joe Pelera, who runs our Private Equity Group.
Thanks, Ken. So I'm Joe Padallero. I run the Private Equity Services business unit here at SS and C. I get to SS and C via the Citi acquisition that was referenced earlier in March of 2016. We're at
a similar
position. And I've actually been with this business unit that I'm representing right now for more than 16 years, longevity that is shared across a large segment of the business management team. As mentioned, our Private Equity Services business enjoys a leadership position in our space. We are the largest private equity fund administrator in the world with more than $550,000,000,000 of committed capital under administration. We continue to see growth in just a wide array of both type of client and product within the asset class.
So, from emerging managers who are outsourcing their 1st fund to middle market managers who are making other multi fund strategic decisions to very the largest asset managers who are going through these evaluations either for the first or a multiple time and making different decisions than they had made before. And the product set that we're seeing interested or more interested in our services continues to be quite diverse. Traditional buyout, heavy focus on closed ended credit funds, a lot of that activity in the high net worth space with respect to private equity, institutional fund to funds, committing an enormous amount of capital into the space and traditional fund to funds, SMAs. So it is quite broad across the board. Our business really enjoys quite a few important market differentiators.
So we have the size and scale to be able to service just about anybody in the space, which is quite different than the typical private equity provider. We've got 600 people around the world specifically focused on this asset class and largely, centered in geographies and locations that face off where the market transacts business in this space, Metro, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Singapore, London, Luxembourg. And again, this is quite a differentiator for our business. And the management team enjoys a long tenured industry specific focus as well, which our clients in the industry, I think, feel is favorable. We continue to see a lot of activity from our existing clients that continue to invest and expand in this space.
And with a long natured tenure of private equity funds, it's incremental business for us every time a new fund comes on board. And we have a quite a full set of solutions both for managers and investors from fund accounting to reporting to portfolio management and administration and had a lot of integration points before the 3 most recent acquisitions we talked about across SS and C and with those even more opportunity to continue to advance the growth of this segment. The industry continues to grow quarter by quarter over 2.5 years as more funds and more capital in the market. Preprint reports that $4,300,000,000,000 of private equity funds has been raised over the last 12 years. And again, this is incremental growth.
The next fund does not come with the fund before it going away. So we have an opportunity for real incremental growth for the 300 plus clients that we do have. There are a high percentage of investors who continue to comment on their commitment to this segment, both in the coming year and in a longer term view. And Preprint continues to be bullish on the overall growth of this segment, which obviously bodes well for the largest provider in this space. Perhaps most importantly, as Rahul mentions, there's an enormous amount of greenfield opportunity in our segment where maybe half of the overall assets being invested and the investors are yet to outsource in this space and that trend is certainly continuing to change in quite a significant manner.
And while our industry is slow moving in terms of being illiquid and long term in nature. As frequent notes, we're probably in a period where there's never been so much change. And we are very uniquely positioned to take advantage of that change. Profiles of the folks that we would consider current and target market clients, quite different and all interested in outsourcing for different reasons. First time managers are keen to buy into substantial substance earlier than they ever had before when they felt like they could do it with sort of 3 guys and the dog in a garage.
Middle market firms are moving toward increasing sophistication in a rapid basis where they used to be comfortable in smaller, small scale situations. The largest of the large private equity managers historically have not outsourced in this space, and there's nothing if not constant dialogue about that right now. In the last 48 hours, I was in front of 3 of the largest managers in the world talking about this in particular. And there are many of them just going through strategic evaluations about how to grow, how to be efficient, how to take advantage of what a firm like ours could, would have already built and they could take advantage of. Sorry to be redundant, got caught in my sentence there.
You know, 3 recent client examples of ours, I think represent what we see in the market. We have a very, very large asset manager who's growing rapidly and made a very quick decision that they needed to outsource the vast bulk of their portfolio that they had historically self administered. And in a couple of year period, we've taken on about $30,000,000,000 of their assets under administration, growing tremendously rapidly. We have another large, recognizable name that have historically had 2 smaller administrators, so committed to the administration, the outsourcing model, but realize that as they continue to grow and want to be globally dynamic and do more with the information that they have, that they needed to change that model and we've started to take, a number of funds away from existing administrators. And another one another very large manager who historically has done everything in house and has been slow to outsource, have taken on products and spaces that they haven't historically had, a large operational footprint and have used that as the opportunity to test the outsourcing market.
And in that case, we've won 2 recent mandates with them. So the a lot of the opportunity messages, I think, consistent with what you've heard before and you'll continue to hear that the growth in the macro PE market, the evolution that's coming, and frankly, how we're positioned as an organization, really provides for us a substantial opportunity to continue to grow, lead and excel in this space. We have many, many hundreds of clients that can continue to use SS and C for more, both within the private equity business and outside of it. And frankly, with the most recent acquisitions, just a tremendous opportunity to partner with as DST and now Intralinks to, to really take advantage of a much larger cross section of clients that we have in house now. And with that, I'll turn it over to Bhagesh Malde.
Thanks, Joe, for that. Just to introduce myself, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Bagesh Malde. I run the Real Assets business here at SS and C. We started the Real Assets division when I joined SS and C last year.
Okay. Just
want to kick it off by giving you an overview of the business so far, then I'll talk a little bit about the market that we're playing in. And then finally, I'll finish on some key initiatives that we've got. So we focused last year on creating a solid foundation for the business, which included pulling together some of our technology solutions that we already had here at SS and C, putting them together with a great team of people that I hired. We had a number of specialists here already, but we've more than doubled the team since I joined. Also focused using the SS and C sales and distribution force.
Eamon Greaves is a strong partner of mine sitting here in the front row and his team brought a lot of opportunities to the table. The variety of opportunities that they brought, I'd never seen before in my previous parts of my career. So we took those opportunities, and we've built a big pipeline. This enabled us to grow significantly this year. And so we've added more than 40 clients this year.
Some of them are new clients. Some of them are existing clients that gave us a lot of new business. And when you look quarter 4 last year to quarter 3 this year, we've already grown about 50% in revenues. I think that number by the end of this year will be over 60%. Just a little bit about some of those mandates.
So some of those mandates were small deals, and that's one of the beauties of being here at SS and C. You can operate across the full spectrum from small investors to large investors. In particular, some of the mandates we got, I was working with Ken Fullerton and his hedge team on clients who are investing in multi strategy funds, very complex funds, and we were able to pull together a solution that enabled us to win that business. And we found that when we worked together, we didn't really have a lot of competition in the marketplace. So whilst we have competitors in the individual strategies, when we pulled all the capabilities of SS and C together, we were pretty unbeatable.
A little bit on the market. So if you look at the first graphic on the top left, that's the core real estate market that I'm addressing, and that's where the majority of my business comes from. So that market is still growing. Last year or this year to June, nearly EUR 1,800,000,000,000 of assets were flowing into real estate. Long term trend has been great.
And after in the last 6 years, the real outsourcing trend started towards outsourcing to fund administrators for what was originally done in house. When you look across the marketplace, the majority is still done in house. So managers are gaining traction in outsourcing. They're doing that to get better technology, make the process more efficient and provide a better service to their investors. Even if the market dipped and slowed down, I think my pipeline would be full because managers are outsourcing for the first time and trying to gain a competitive advantage in this space.
The second chart at the bottom shows you the growth in open ended real estate funds. They've become really attractive to real estate investment managers because it's allowed them to expand their investor base and benefit from capturing long term capital. This accounts for the steady growth that you see there, and we see a continual trend of closed end real estate managers opening open ended funds to capture that capital. Last year, we didn't have any clients that were open ended funds. This year, we won our first one.
We've now won 4. We're just about to win 5 6 before the end of the year, and each one has provided a reference for the next one. So I feel we're really well placed in that marketplace. The last chart is the BDC market. Rahul mentioned that earlier.
We've seen a continual growth of funds and listed on the chart is the number of funds. You can see that it's approaching nearly 100 BDC funds. And the growth of those funds really directly related to the global financial crisis where banks retreated from the lending space to middle market companies and BDCs were set up to fill that gap. I don't think we'll see that long term trend slowdown. And we're developing a product to address the needs of those clients.
We have some of those clients today, but we realize that if we could harness some of the best technology that we have, including capabilities from DST, that you heard from Mike about And from Advent, we could deliver a product that would be more superior if we combine it with the accounting expertise we have in our group. And lastly, I just want to focus on the core initiatives that I have in my business.
The
They're fairly obvious, I would say. I mentioned the BDC product already. We're planning to go to market very soon with a product that we think will be most superior than anyone else in the marketplace. We think that's a great place for us to focus. We continue to focus using the sales force on new managers launching their first fund, and we like playing in that space.
Those deals are relatively small, dollars 100,000 $200,000 each, but there's lots of them. We continue to win larger mandates, that involves a fund conversion of a stable of funds, sometimes coming from inside the investment manager, but we started to see people switching administrators looking for a better solution. Those transitions, those conversions take a long time, but they come with much larger revenue potential. DST and Intralinks continue to provide I think will continue to provide important cross sell opportunities to us. We've seen a lot from DST.
I think as soon as we close the deal with Intralinks, I'll be best friends with Leaf. Overall, the competitive space, I think some of our competitors started focusing on this market a few years before us. But I think we've demonstrated in the last 18 months that we've caught up. So we've caught up in terms of the array of talent that we have inside the business, and I think it's very much a talent driven business. The person with the most talent will probably capture the most business.
But when you combine that talent with the technology array that we have at SS and C, I do think we're going to pull ahead of our competitors in the next few years. And that's my update. Thanks. I should introduce Kristi Bremner. Kristi runs the Investment and Institutional sorry, the Institutional and Investment Management Business.
Thanks.
All right. Good afternoon. So I'm Kristi Bremner. I run Institutional Investment of Porsche and I've been running INIM for a couple of years now. Sorry, if I can figure out how to use this large order.
This one? There you go. So I and I so unlike some of the businesses that you hear about today, INIM is really a roll up, if you will, of a number of SS acquisitions and businesses. And we put these businesses together because we felt like there was opportunity to do so. They all focus on the same market segments.
So we're covering investment managers and asset owners. We're all selling to the same buyers and maintain relationships with the same key strategic senior executives in the organizations. And there's significant overlap in the user communities that use the products and services that are within the group. Probably more importantly, when you think about the front to back operations of these types of organizations, our product service component some larger than others of that broad spectrum. So we're covering a wide range of what these organizations need.
And so that's actually created a lot of opportunity for this group in terms of how we engage with the market and how we engage in new opportunities. We're more holistic and we're more strategic because we're covering a broader capability set, how we provide services to our customers and how we engage with our customers from a professional services basis in helping them advance the objectives that are important for their business. So we operate and fit with customers in 57 different countries. We're very global. More than half of our customers' annual revenue is outside of the U.
S. And we focus on about 1300 individual relationships today. In terms of our market, so investment managers and asset owners, we kind of break that down into 3 key areas. So we're focused on wealth, wealth and asset management and insurance. Each of these three areas has obviously different dynamics and characteristics that change from time to time.
In the wealth market, it's a lot about, for example, accumulation of wealth and how wealth managers figure out how to address the needs of new generation wealth and old generation wealth. In Asset Management, there's a lot still a focus still on compliance and regulatory items. And in insurance, there's just a continued focus towards moving towards alternative investments. But in these three areas, there's a couple of themes that cut across all of them that are really significant opportunities for us. So the first is consolidation.
And consolidation, we believe, is an opportunity. And that's really organizations kind of looking at themselves and realizing that they have too many systems, duplicative systems, multiplicity and the different things that they do. And they're looking to achieve benefits from consolidating that. So it might be going from less systems or less people and less processes. And the promise of all of that is obviously cost savings, but there are other important benefits to that around operational quality and less risk and operations and better access to data and data meaning.
And so given our broad capability set, we feel like this is a really good opportunity for us in terms of how we can help customers consolidate their organizations that have become complex over time, whether it's from M and A or from just organizational restructure changes that, reflect in changes in the business over time. And the second is competitive differentiation. And in this context is our customers differentiating themselves competitively. And there's just a lot of, investment and focus and projects in this area right now. We're seeing it everywhere we operate in the globe.
And that's really about our customers making sure that they're retaining their customers and are able to win new names. So we have a number of top products and brands in this area that are helping our customers focus on customer communication and portals and engagement and performance measurement and attribution. And so those are keeping us very busy right now from a sales perspective. In terms of our key initiatives, so we're kind of focused on these three things. So first is our customers, And of course, you would be focused on your customers.
But for us, I think there's a big opportunity within our customer base. If you think about this group and its makeup of acquisitions in different businesses, we have a number of customers that use a few of our capabilities and our opportunity is to expand that, whether we're expanding the number of products that they can use and how we help them use those products or whether we're helping them with outsourcing services around the use of our products. So it's really about understanding our customers, helping them understand how we can help them and expanding what we're doing for them, and the organizations. In terms of new customer acquisition, it's the same kind of concept, it's just with new names. So given our assembly of capabilities, we're able to approach new opportunities with potential buyers and they may come to us thinking that they're solving one specific pain point, but relative to our competitors, we're able to go to them and help them solve a broader set of pain points than what they're envisioning.
So the same sort of things going on in these two points, but just sort of different execution when you're addressing new names versus customers. And lastly, we've got a lot going on in terms of our investments in our products and our technologies and our services. And of course, we have to focus on, as always feature, function, capabilities that the products need to be able to do over time to stay competitive. We're very focused on our product integration and how we bring all of the products that we have within the group together to simplify the user experience for that and some of the technology underneath it. We're leveraging a lot of newer technologies and innovative technologies today.
The technologies that we're leavening are to deliver business benefits. It's not about technology for technology stake. It's really about how do these technologies help us deliver more efficiencies in your organization, better understanding of data, faster processes, things of that nature. So we're doing a lot today with AI and machine learning and bots and robotics. And Norm is going to talk about that a little later on and what's going on with Singularity.
All right. So with that, I'll hand it over to Rob Rolle.
That's right. Thanks very much. So, I'm Robert Rollie. I run the Advent business. And as many of you know, Advent joined SS and C in 2015 via acquisition.
Like a lot of people have said, this is a lot about talent. I have a team of just short of 1200, 300 of which have been in my business for over 10 years. We have strong market leadership and
then we have the opportunity to expand a lot of our client
relationships as well as expand into a little bit of the high level of our markets. So the first one is wealth management. A little bit of the high level of our markets. So the first one is Wealth Management. This is the fastest growing segment that we're in.
And we think of this segment specifically as of warehouses, because the independents are also taking a lot of business away. Because this is a fast growing segment, it's a hypercompetitive segment. And so we focus a lot on completeness of our solution and partnerships with other industry players. We've launched a lot of new products in the last 18 months, the most recent of which was a Rebalancer product that's on our Black Diamond platform. We sold the first client on October 5, and in the last 42 days, we've added 68 clients.
So we think that that's pretty good testament to the demand for that product. And the way that that works and from a revenue perspective is those clients generally pay some basis points and for each of those 68 clients of the about 1,000 in total that we have on that platform, it increases what they pay us between 20% 25%. So we look forward for really in the next several quarters getting the vast majority of those 1,000 customers using that capability. I think with this market, it's also very much about how you manage the partners and the channel within this segment. It's a very heavily influenced market in terms of who they use as their custodians.
So the relationships that DST brought with the sort of the big five RAA custodians were really important in our solidifying of those relationships. There's also opportunity for us in the broker dealer space that really has been untapped by us to this point. It's very it's been opportunistic. We have some clients, but really we've been focused on the independents. And then we think we have a lot of opportunity if we take particularly the Black Diamond platform outside the U.
S. To date, it's been exclusively sold in the domestic market. Our second, I jumped past, is the asset management market. So this is both high net worth asset management and institutional management. Now this is pretty stagnant if you look at the total number of players, assets over the last several years, but it's been a growing business for us in a couple of ways.
There's been a couple of bright spots in that market, particularly for us internationally, we've been growing much faster in this market than we have been in the U. S. And even more specifically within the Middle East. But our big strategy for this market is really about growing our client relationships. Over the last several years, whereas historically for the last 30 plus, we were selling almost exclusively technology, over 70% of our new clients are not just licensing technology, they're also adopting services, which could be sourcing services.
And so the deals that we're winning are larger than they were historically, and that's how we're growing. We're also building new product. We launched 5 products in 2017 and we acquired another one. I think both Bill and Rahul mentioned Advent Genesis, that's a really important product for us, which launched last year. It's important for multiple reasons.
It's growing those opportunities, but it's really the reason that we're winning those opportunities, because it's a very capable system that's targeted to the portfolio manager. And I think as Bill talked about that, that makes the sale and the evaluation more strategic than it was in the past as opposed to just finding some efficiency in the back office. We're giving more efficiency and better information to the portfolio managers as they're making decisions. And the last segment that's a big one for us is alternatives. And this comes up a lot in the questions that were asked earlier, but then also when you heard from Ken and Mike and Joe, I mean, where we particularly play in the alternative space is in the complex end of the mutual fund, separate account, really in anywhere in the world.
And mutual fund, separate account, really in anywhere in the world. And those are the funds and those are the firms that have been doing well. And not only have they been doing well, blurring the lines between what was a hedge fund and what was a private equity fund by putting private debt and
distressed debt in a
closed end structure. And frankly, there's a lot of point players that really have done well in private equity fund by putting private debt and distressed debt in a closed end structure. And frankly, there's a lot of point players that really have done well in private equity or well in hedge or well in one market, but really very few, which is to say one that can crossover. And so this market is growing for us really because complexity is our strength and our differentiator. This is also the market where we probably see the most cross sell activity with our hedge fund administration, private equity administration business.
And then also have seen in the past and probably will continue to see more with the Eds business. So with that, I'm going to pass it off to Jeff Shoreman, who is the Head of Edge.
Thank you very much, Rob, and good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Jeff Scharman. I lead EZ. My background, I've been with EZ for about 19 years in a variety of roles.
And I think I speak for the entire Eze team when I say we're excited to be joining the SS and C family. I think many of you are familiar with Eze, but if you are not, just a quick introduction. We provide solutions and technologies to help asset managers increase both their operational and investment alpha. The way the crude analogy I like to use to break that down is you can think of us as the intraday ERP for an asset manager. So we start on the portfolio managers' desks.
They're able to model trades portfolios, send those orders through to the trading desk running our software where they can execute it with what I think is one of the largest networks of counterparties out there. The middle and back office using our tools can reconcile their positions, can manage their books and importantly can manage allocations in funds that are increasingly becoming more complex, all while ensuring that their funds are in compliance both with global regulations and with investor guidelines. Our system is real time. So through the day, you can see tick by tick, fill by fill as executions happen, where their P and L is, where their exposures are, where their liquidity is. So in many ways, it's used to manage intraday risk for those funds.
We deliver these solutions through our suite of products. So there's the EZ OMS, the order management system. There's the EZ execution management system and the portfolio management and analytics tools. Together, those suites of products we call the as investment suite and we go to market with that. You can buy any one of those products individually, but increasingly customers are bundling those solutions together and buying the broader suite to manage their entire fund.
You've heard it mentioned a few times, but we've also launched a new product called Ezeclipse. So Ezeclipse is all of that functionality reimagined in a native cloud we'll be demoing it, at the kiosk outside. We'll be demoing it at the kiosk outside. Our customer base today, we serve about 1900 different asset management firms globally. About 75% of our business does come from the hedge fund industry.
But increasingly and importantly, about 25% of our business comes from the long only space. And that's been a trend that's continued and been a proactive effort on our part to continue to diversify the business and take our tools upstream. We've got about 40% of the hedge funds that are over $10,000,000,000 in AUM and our tools do support all asset classes. I think historically when people think of us, they may think of us more in the equity space, but the majority of our clients now are global multi strategy, multi asset class funds. My team is about 1100 in 14 offices around the world, and a lot of the same places that SS and C is.
So when you think about the market that we serve, the OMS and EMS space, which is our flagship products, continues to grow at a pace of about 6.5%. The drivers of that space are similar to what you've heard from some of the other presenters. It's global compliance and regulation. It's the demand for investor transparency. It's the increasing complexity of those investment strategies.
And one of the things we like to say is that complexity is our front. The more complex it is for these asset managers to run their business and manage these books, the more they need software like ours. As we look at the macro environment that we've been participating in, you certainly see that it's been a headwind for us both in terms of the general hedge fund market, as well as volatility and volume, which does contribute to our revenue. But through that, I think importantly, we've been able to sell a record number of new trading clients and that's 2016 to 2017, 2017 and what we're projected to do in 2018. So we've that is one of the most important KPIs of our business is adding new customers and continuing to grow the network.
And we think we're excited when we look out at the opportunities with SS and C to continue that momentum. So when you look at our, key initiatives, across the business, so we want to accelerate the rollout of the EZ Eclipse platform. As I mentioned earlier, we've got about 55 customers on that. It is targeting a new segment for us. We're going after kind of the smaller start up emerging manager as the beginning.
We plan to take that to other regions to Asia Pacific to Europe in 2019, and continue to move that product upstream and to go after larger and more complex asset managers with that new product. So we're really excited about that and look to continue to work with it and also look for ways to integrate that with all the tremendous work that SS and C has been doing with Singularity. We think there's a great opportunity there. We want to continue to push into the long only space. As I mentioned, about 25% of our business comes from traditional long only managers.
We want to continue to do that and use the breadth and reach of SS and C to help us do that. Our products are highly complementary. They're mission critical. And we think there's a tremendous opportunity to cross sell with our new partners here, whether that's in the fund administration business, you saw the assets under management and the need to take technology and be able to distribute that out to end customers. But also in working with Christy Bremer and Rob Broly and the other teams here, where you see our specialty in the front marrying that with a lot of the middle and back office solutions that we have across the firm will be a tremendous opportunity.
And through that, we'll be looking to hit our numbers. We've got about $30,000,000 in synergies. I think we've got a good plan to execute on that to make that happen. I think Ed has done a tremendous job over the last 5 year cycle, driving profitability through the business. We look to continue that.
So with that, it's my pleasure to introduce, Leaf O'Leary, who leads, the Intralinks business.
Thank you.
All right. Good afternoon. Nice to be here. I guess, I need to start by saying, I'd say I'm the newest member of the SS and C family, but since we're not quite all the way there yet, I'm even earlier than the newest member of the family, but it is great to be here and share a little bit of our story. I'm going to just do 3 basic things.
1, I'm going to try to get the group oriented a bit on Intralinks, just so you know who we are, talk a little bit about our markets, and then lastly, just wrap with why I think this joining with SS and C is so exciting as it relates to our key initiatives, because there's an unbelievable acceleration opportunity that exists, okay? Let me start with the basics. Intralinks, in many respects, lines up beautifully with what Bill and Raul and the team have been talking about 2 very important areas. 1, culture. We really have been and remain committed to focusing on markets that we can win.
And that starts with a people first orientation and a culture of execution. So what that's allowed us to do over now close to 2 decades is establish a market leadership position focused in some very specific markets that have a lot of close interconnectivity, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in just a minute. The team has put us into a position where we have a who's who of clients that most would envy, and I think you're hearing that across this entire morning. I've just been really impressed with the quality of the customers that all these businesses are serving. But we have over 4,000 clients.
We touch the entire Fortune 1,000 essentially, in a fairly persistent way. And that's a really powerful asset for us. Within that, we sort of peel out a meaningful sort of brand and identity ubiquity across those constituents, which leads to some of the important go forward opportunity as we look at it. There's a set of offerings that we bring to bear in the market. Many know Intralinks through our flagship offering around M and A, but that's just part of what we do to serve the markets that we approach.
We also bring a set of interesting capabilities around the way the alternative investment ecosystem, prosecute its work, specifically around raising money and then sharing information across the ecosystem, a really important growth opportunity as a part of the SS and C family for sure. And then within the banking sector, we are a persistent presence across the largest banks in the world. And so we then solve within that banking environment a set of sort of cross boundary content transfer challenges that open up a really interesting presence. And I again, I think when I look at SSNC, I see fairly interesting road ahead in terms of what that might lead to in terms of outsourcing opportunities and other ways that we can become a more sticky member of that environment. So in the slides, you'll see a bunch of details on this one slide around the markets.
I'm not going to go quite so deep in market by market what we do. I actually want to do 2 things. When you look at these 3 specific markets we serve, why am I so bullish about the potential? Well, there's a few things. 1, we are a market leader in what we do.
So that's important. I think we can build on that strength. 2, within each of those submarkets, there is a consistent pattern of meaningful unmet needs, unmet in the form of doing it manually, don't have a great solution for it, legacy fractured approaches to solving problems. And because of our presence in those markets, we get a very persistent ask of, hey, can you solve this? Can you do that?
And simple examples I could give you, the alternative investment ecosystem, PE players have been asking Intralinks to come bring some complementary solutions. Can you do a little bit more on the CRM side? Can you do a little bit more in terms of the way we might become data agnostic and share more sources of information across our ecosystem. Those are compelling capabilities as SS and C is off focused on already that we can bring to market. So we really like the fact that we have a market leadership position in these markets, there's unmet needs.
And then more broadly, there's a set of drivers into these markets that we serve that are also very important. And you've heard a lot of these come up through the course of today as well. Things like the growing risk profile, compliance profile, how we manage an evolving threat profile to sensitive information, because if you were to boil what Intralinks does down to its core, you'd find secure content transfer across regulated industries and processes. So that's a big factor. Then there's developing technology or market phenomenas like artificial intelligence, machine learning, what blockchain does to chain a custody and how people think about protecting the life of information.
These are things that fly very much in a strong sort of tailwind position to what we're doing from an interlinked standpoint and how we're thinking about innovating and attacking these markets. So there's a very nice complementary nature of the way we're thinking about our markets, the needs in the markets and what broader market trends will allow us to do in terms of innovating. Overall, in the Intralinks business alone, we look at about a $4,500,000,000 TAM. So smaller than some of the numbers you're seeing here today, but robust from the standpoint of a company our size and the growth prospects, okay? So last thing I'll just talk about, and I think this is really important in the context of why I know the day we left the meeting having met with Bill and Rahul and extended members of the team that are here, it was very clear to me that of the When I think about what we're doing to sort of drive profitable growth in the Intralinks business, it really comes down to a few basic concepts.
1, we brought the business back to being very focused on those core markets I discussed. There's tremendous synergy with what SS and C is focused on. Secondly, we're very focused on innovating in those core markets. And when I heard Bill take us through in that one conversation briefly the areas of focused innovation that SS and C was looking at, there was tremendous overlap of what we were thinking about doing. And now that we're when we have brought the Intralinks business to focus on innovation again, we're really well positioned to go deliver on a lot of those unmet needs that I referenced earlier on SS and C will be an accelerator for us going and doing that.
The 3rd dimension, which was well in flight ahead of the SS and C acquisition and now will just be elevated is what I call sort of a commitment to operational excellence, Intralinks business over a number of years, and I've been with the business about 5.5, 6 years now, had sort of through a
period of sort of distracted
a with clean operational processes, cost excellence, cost out excellence, if you will, I think we can sort of manifest the best possible version of Intralinks in SS and C. And again, just in simple ways, I was building out an India strategy, which just so happens that SS and C has a pretty nice footprint in India. That's an accelerator for us to go drive cost out and output up in our business. And again, just a simple example and there's a multitude of those that we're working on in anticipation of our close. So I think what we're most excited about from an interlink standpoint is the cultural match and the opportunity for this to accelerate our critical initiatives, which will then drive very smart and profitable growth.
We think this can be a big part of the growth story at SS and C as we look forward, okay? So with that, I'll pass the mic to Anthony, who is somewhere in the room. Oh, here he is. He'll take some time to go through the technology strategy.
Hello, everybody. My name is Anthony Kayafa. I am the new Chief Technology Officer here at SS and C. I've been here for about 4 months so far. And as Raul said, I came from Bloomberg.
So I was in Bloomberg's office of the CTO running infrastructure, infrastructure engineering, data centers and some of the software development side. So I'm extremely excited to be here. And I wanted to just address a couple of areas that my team is currently focusing on. We'll look at data centers, security and some of the innovations that we're doing from the infrastructure side of the house. So one of the main themes that everyone keeps saying here today is technology resiliency, redundancy, having the ability to scale quicker time to market.
And all of those things require machines, environments and data centers to run inside of. So the data center for us is the lifeblood of the organization. I have to ensure that we're reliant, we're redundant, we're able to scale quickly, we're able to deliver services for my customers and everyone else's customers, and to be able to provide full managed hosting capabilities and kind of the experience from the private cloud standpoint. And as Raul and Bill had said before, especially for me knowing that the data center is the primary place that the customers rely on us to be able to serve their services, I don't want to have to rely on a 3rd party to run my infrastructure. I want to own end to end.
I want to own from the front of the house where everything runs to the back of the house where all the critical infrastructure is. So I know that and I could sleep well at night knowing that my team of experts maintaining and ensuring that everything is running smoothly for us and our customers. And that plays well into the security piece of this, right? So security is extremely important for us and extremely important for all of our customers, right? It's a huge theme in our industry, especially in the financial sector.
And coming from Bloomberg, we take we always took a very huge paranoid approach towards everything. And that's kind of the same approach that I see here at SS and C, right. We focus on making sure that we're using some of the state of the art technologies for the global SOC SIEMs that we're deploying that we could really take machine data that's coming from the server side, compare it to some of these world leading intelligence feeds and do some machine learning and anomaly detection on that data, so we could better protect us and all of our customers. We're really focusing on expanding our red team and blue team exercises. So not only are we ensuring that we're protected from east to west traffic, but we're also ensuring that our perimeter is constantly protected and the teams are constantly verifying that the feed data that we're getting is accurate and we could protect ourselves against it going forward and ensuring that our customers are also protected from these sites.
And one of the last areas that we're focusing on is infrastructure innovation, right. So we're really focusing on capacity upgrades to our private cloud globally, right? With all these new data centers, we have a much larger footprint across the world. And within that, we want to ensure that our private cloud is resilient and redundant through all of those facilities. What that gives us is, especially with all the services that we have to support, it gives us the ability to spin up instances and spin up the different products much quicker, so we could have a quicker time to market.
And one of the last there is that the team is focusing on is we're looking at data science as a service. So we're working with some large customers that use a wide variety of our products and the fact that they have a wide variety of our products, we have a very large set of their data, right. So now we're giving them the ability to kind of look at the data across all of the products and run some ETL processing and data analytics on top of it, so they could see where those synergies are with the different products and the different data types. And one of the last areas that I'd like to mention is that we're focusing on this new PaaS deployment. So the PaaS is giving one of our larger customers the ability to interact directly with kind of our private cloud and our infrastructure.
So it allows them to spin up and spin down instances and really see how the infrastructure is performing for them and ensuring that it's up and it's reliable.
And that's my update.
Like to introduce Norm Bullinger.
Hi everybody, I'm Norm Bolandreau, I'm Managing Director of Immuno, Vice Chairman of SS and C and with me is Scott Kirland, He's the Manager and Director of Singularity. And also in the audience, we have Tom McMacken, who designed and built Singularity with his very talented team and Mark Zimmerman, who's heading up product marketing and Product Management for Singularity. So if you have questions after the session. What is Singularity? I mean, Singularity is the 1st smart investment accounting operations system with embedded artificial intelligence.
That includes robotics, machine learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing. When we designed this system, we wanted to find a way to eliminate all the many systems our clients have to use across many different asset classes, across many different industries. So this is designed to go across asset class and across industries. So insurance, asset management, hedge, really all of our customer base, a single unified platform that allows people to get leverage and capability in a single end to end system. If we can do that, that's first time in the history of my experience in the software business that somebody has built a single end to end platform that includes accounting operations and accounting and reporting.
And it provides tremendous synergies. And what we think is our clients are going to be able to get 40% to 50% operating efficiencies by eliminating many of their current systems into a single platform, right? I think that's very valuable to our customers and to SS and C. And from my perspective, that's the least of what Singularity is going to do. With practical applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning, going to give data context, it's going to give our customers insight so their performance number or NAV has context.
It doesn't just balance, right? It doesn't just have debits equal credits, right? It understands that the performance number relative to what's happening in the market today makes sense and give our customers and our users the information they need to interrogate that data, validate that data before they report it to the ranked clients. And so if it does all that, I think it's going to transform investment account and operations for our customers and for SS and C. As I mentioned, most of our customers have many applications.
Some have 7 or 10 just to handle their securities portfolio. They have others for commercial loans. They have other for real estate property management. It's very complicated. They're different systems.
They're disparate technologies, lots of operational requirements and workflows around it. And they're forced today because of the capability of the current systems to choose between a best of breed model, which has many systems that are very deep and very good functionally at what they do, but not a single end to end solution that can handle that depth and that breadth of what the requirements for our customers are. We think we've built that. We've identified we have a sellable system right now for many of our customers. We've identified development gaps for things that we need to close out for the remaining requirements for our customers, right?
If you're looking for a new system today, you probably have to look at a legacy application that might be 30 years old like, let's say, Symcor, APL based system, been around a long time, probably 40 years, right? And they've tried to extend it from treasury to insurance. These aren't purpose built systems from the ground up, like renovating an old home. All kinds of surprises, all kinds of limitations. We built a brand new product from scratch designed purposely to go across asset class, across industry, and the AI is embedded in the system, and that's a critical distinction for our customers.
An example of that is for public companies there's a SOC 1 report that is the service and organizational controls. Today, the accounting department manually keeps track of many, many steps to prove that they've met the requirements for the company. The system is designed to actually read the information in the system and decide for itself whether you met those requirements or not. And that's the difference in the before and after picture on many practical applications of this technology. I guess if I could say one thing about this is this is real.
It's a real product. It's sellable right now for some of our customers. It'll be sellable in the future for the largest scale organizations over the next 18 to 24 months. And we've built a tremendous amount of accounting capability. We've built artificial intelligence into it today that can be demonstrated, and Scott's going to demonstrate some of that to you shortly.
And we've built actionable monitors that will change the user experience of our software customers, right? We've reached out to the market. We did a soft launch at our user conference in September, had about 200 attendees at our sessions, and
it went very well, very
well received. People were very impressed. We've People were very impressed. We probably had about over 40 customer interactions to date. We'll probably have 100 by the end of the year, all positive reviews of what the potential of this technology is on their business.
So we think we're getting some validation in the marketplace. We have a couple of wins. One is the large consultant engagement that's going to allow us to demonstrate a before and after picture for a world class insurance company in New York City, dollars 400,000,000,000 asset under management. And we think that's an opportunity for us to close in Q1 of next year. So we got some real wins.
That's market validation. We've been the industry influencers, consultant firms. Everyone is really looking for a practical way to change the environment for investment, account and operations. And most people are talking about AI, but that's all they're doing. And they're trying to layer AI on top of an existing application.
This is a purpose built system with AI. I think it's going to transform the whole operating environment. We've got some people in production. We probably have 30 customers either who have given us verbals or in production, in parallel processing or planning to go into implementation. So next year, we're planning to have a formal launch of the product and we're excited about the opportunity.
And you guys know Bill pretty well. He's a high expectation guy and it really is a privilege for me to introduce this product, but I know it comes with high expectations, right? And I wouldn't have it any other way. So key revenue drivers. I think the number one thing I want to point out here is I think we have a technology that when we compete against our competitors really has a tremendous competitive advantage, right?
Not a 30 year old legacy application that's been repurposed for another function, right? And these are functionally rich systems, but they're not something that necessarily you don't want to put a SIM Corp in or an Eagle in or a PAM in to your environment for the next 25 years, right? So I think the technology stack, the capability, the vision of this product, the practical application of AI where you go from ticking and tying a portfolio, the leverage and information so that you can eliminate a lot of the current roles and responsibilities in an organization and increase the level of awareness and insight and knowledge of the accounting and reporting information is really something that our clients are embracing. They're going to save a lot of money and they're going to increase their capability. And for SS and C, there was a question earlier in the audience about outsourcing.
And if we automate all this stuff in our outsourcing department, how is that going to cannibalize our outsourcing business? The answer is no, right? We're going to automate everything. The idea here is to automate everything after the trade. Right now, it's automated up to the trade break, but no one's automating past that.
We're looking to automate everything after that. And if we do that in our outsourcing business, our margins are going to improve, but we sell value to our customers, right? So our cost isn't going to go down to our customers. Our margins are going to go up and the value proposition for my customers is also going to go up.
So with that, I'll turn it over to Scott to
do the demo. Hopefully, you guys will be impressed, and these guys are all available for questions afterwards.
So I'm Scott Kerland, Managing Director here at SS and C, and I head up the product and marketing initiatives for Singularity product we're going to show you momentarily. A little bit about my background. I came over, joined the firm earlier this year after running workflow technology for ITG for about 8 years. And really we were spending a lot of time focusing on applying machine learning and predictive analytics to the trading and transaction cost analysis space. So when Raul and Norm and Bill came and said, would you be interested in taking a look at how we can apply that to the middle and back office space for Investment Accounting and Operations, I was super excited.
And so I think I have the cool job here today. I get to actually show you what we're doing around AI and predictive analytics and machine learning. There's been a lot of talk about it, I think, in the industry and some might say that it's been in some ways a solution looking for a problem. I think we kind of looked at it in a different way and we looked across the organization and the middle office and outsourcing challenges that we have as well as those that clients have and we try to find practical ways to apply this technology in real examples. So I'm going to actually show it to you.
I do realize that I'm probably the last thing standing between you and lunch. So I'll keep it reasonably brief, but we'll be available afterwards for some questions as we go through it. So the first thing to note is that we designed Singularity in the cloud. It's browser agnostic. It's a hosted solution and it's fully responsive.
So if I change the size of the application, I want to come in through an iPad or Surface tablet or my iPhone, we gave it the ability to be ultimately flexible based on the user community, both for our own users and for our end clients that may want access to the system. We also designed it in such a way that the user experience was completely customizable on the fly, so that different types of users could see information and act on information that was relevant to them based on their role, based on their level of hierarchy within the organization and entitlements as well as based on the assets in the industry segments that they service. So what you can see here is if I was an asset manager and I wanted to go ahead and move some of these tiles around and create different views or I wanted to add different views say, view of my cash flow activity over time, I can go ahead and add this information in. I can create that view and experience the way I want it, and then I can push that out to any number of users within the system.
And I can also create different views based on my role. So something that a portfolio manager might want to see is different than an operations person that cares about trade breaks, reconciliations, events affecting the portfolio or something that an investment accounting officer cares about with respect to their trial balance or performance. So we really designed it to be extremely flexible from that perspective. We also spent a lot of time over the course of building the application to incorporate all of these asset classes side by side, as Norm had mentioned before. So it's pretty powerful to see how you can look at, for example, your securities holdings, whether they be asset backed instruments or bonds or on the OTC side interest rate swaps or repos or loans within the system.
And we're working with Bagesha's team and Joe's team to incorporate real property, real assets, limited partnerships and so forth in the platform. So there will be a comprehensive view of those assets and the portfolios in real time. And I think what we're going to show you in a second with some of the machine learning is that we have linked operations and accounting so that effectively our clients and our own users can have a real time accounting books book of records. Anything that impacts the portfolio operationally, a trade break or correction, a price change, a rate reset, a corporate action, as soon as it hits the portfolio, it updates the accounting book at the same time. It creates those debits and credits.
That's a paradigm shift in the industry. Traditionally, operations are done and then there's a batch process that ships things off to portfolio accounting. It runs its process overnight and clients end up with a T+1 or in some cases we've even seen a T+2 view of their accounting books and records. This is a paradigm shift. Real time, it's intraday.
So let me show you a couple of just a couple of areas where we're applying machine learning to kind of address operational and accounting challenges that we've seen within the system. So the first is the first areas I want to talk about is data integration. So you think about onboarding new counterparties, whether they be custodians, brokers, trustees, prime brokers within the world of interfacing with accounting and operations system. It's a pretty manual process to do. So I'm going to show you in about a minute or so how we do this with machine learning.
We're going to implement a counterparty here. We're going to teach the system then how to match those records and deal with exceptions and then we're going to go a step further. So if you take a look here, I've got a view into the current cash transactions and positions that are sitting in this demo database within Singularity. So I can import into the system in any format, whether it be CSV, Excel, XML, Swift message, you name it, records and data within the systems. I'm going to load up positions from a custodian.
I'm going to load up a whole series of cash transactions from multiple custodians. And just for fun, I'll load up an order management system file, something that could come from one of our OMSs or Charles River Aladdin, another front office system. Within a few seconds, the system parsed that data with or without column headers, extra fields and so forth. And it figured out by looking at the Singularity data schema, what data was relevant within the system in order to be able to recognize it and match it up, basically turn it into readable information for Singularity. Once that's been done, I can now go ahead and just link these two things together.
It will take a few seconds to do that. And what you'll see is this little link light comes on. The system is now putting those side by side. So I can see all of the positions that are in Singularity and I can see that all of the records that are in the custodial file that came over. The system hasn't done anything yet, but if I start clicking around on a couple of these records, the machine learning is actually sorting through those records and making a best guess at what the appropriate matches are within the system.
For simplicity purposes and time, I'm just going to show you some one to ones, but these could be one to many, many to many, many to 1, it would group accordingly. And this number here is a confidence level, how confident it is that the record is the right match. There are about 600 records in this particular file. If you watch, I'm going to start teaching it, I'm going to start training it how to match records up here. And you'll see a little blue bar on the bottom that's popping up and it's kind of doing this as I go.
And I have to teach it a few times in order to learn a pattern. So what you'll see here, okay, it was able to do, and if I do a few more of these here, it should clear out all of the rest of them. One more should do it. So it was able to go ahead and match and apply that learning to all of the records in that file. And by the way, it will do that every time I reload that file from now on, okay, or those records.
The only time it would do it would then prompt me to do something different is if it came across something it hadn't learned before. So I did that. And by the way, if I match something that was incorrect,
if I taught it bad
behavior, I can unwind that behavior. I can basically teach you to unlearn and retrain it accordingly. So I did that with cash positions sorry, with positions. I could do the same thing with cash. And with cash, for example, I have to teach it different things.
I have to teach it that the transaction type is important, the settlement amount is important. I have to teach it, for example, that the custodian counterparty is relevant. And again, what you're going to see in a minute here is that blue bar will slow down, It's still thinking and it's now applying this to a bunch of other records. And if I do 1 or 2 more here, it should clear out the rest of these pretty quickly in the process. And then there'll be a few records left within the system.
And at that point, here we go, I have a bunch of records that were in the file and I have to basically tell them that, okay, these are really just sweep transactions that want to go ahead and post the interest to a sweep account. And if I do a couple of these within the pattern, it will go ahead and it will apply that capability and then it will match those up. And I can do this as an N Way function. So if you think about this, we're just applying this here to matching, for example, trades, cash, positions. But this technology, we're also able to leverage to do conversions.
So as we look at clients on other data systems, okay, and bringing those that historical data in and teaching it very quickly. This is an exercise that would normally take weeks to do in many cases, and you have to constantly retest it. I was able to train the system to do it in 3 minutes or 2 minutes. So let me go one step further. In this particular example, we didn't have any breaks, but inevitably we do.
So this is an area where within the Singularity framework, we've decided to leverage a lot of the capabilities and what we call microservices that exist within the SS and C framework, access to things like pricing feeds from market data providers, credit ratings, so we pull in from an S and P or Moody's, factors, corporate actions, global security master capabilities, rate resets. All of this information is pulled in, in real time to impact the portfolio. Because we have this data, we can teach the machine automatically to go ahead and do something a human would do in order to try to resolve a break. So let me give you an example. Here I have something that shows pending resolution.
Okay, if I click into this particular record, I have a break here of about $5,000 on $1,000,000 I think it's a common stock position here. If I look at the record side by side, the system is looking and we had it say, okay, let's make sure that the security ID matches, it does. Let's make sure that the quantity matches, it does. Well, the market value is off, okay, the first thing you would do as a human, if you wanted to check to see whether you have the right market value, is you would check price. So we had the system automatically go out to multiple data sources here, in this case Reuters, IDC and Bloomberg.
We could set up the hierarchy to do independent validation on whether we have the right price on a particular record. 3 came back the same, so the system is pretty confident we do. So we then had it go ahead and check the custodial record. And sure enough, the custodial record in this case was off by about 5 tenths of a penny. So knowing that, the system was able to automatically create and generate an e mail to the custodian saying here's the information we know, here's the information you know, by the way, we went out, did a price validation to these three sources on this date, here's the results, there's the context Norm was talking about, please go ahead and review accordingly.
And we stuck it in pending state, okay? At that point, 1 or 2 things could happen. Custodian will look at it, go ahead and make the change, we'd catch it in the next message, the trade break is cleared, we mark it accordingly. Or they come back and say, no, we're right, you're wrong, you're looking at the secondary market, you should be looking at the primary. And right now, we can go ahead and
make that in line modification, track it and the adjustment accordingly.
The next step of this is record look for key points of data that would trigger a reason to override the record and then either do it or have the user be prompted to say review these 5 records, is what we think you should do based on the data that came in, sort of completing the cycle. So you think about it, we've done this in the case of a price break. But back to my previous example, we have data on corporate actions, okay? So let's say the break instead was on quantity and I noticed a 3 to 1 difference in quantity, I can go out and I can check to see if there was a 3 to 1 stock split. I could do the same thing on a cash flow accrual for a rate change.
So those are some of the ways we're applying it for breaks, for reconciliation, data integration. And I just want to take 2 more minutes and show you a couple of areas where we're applying predictive analytics for auto entry and automation as well. One of the things we wanted to do with this type of system given the scope and the scale that we're trying to accomplish across assets and industry sectors is make it intuitive for people to use. The next generation of operations and accounting folks in middle and back office are not going to want to read a 45 page manual to learn how to use a system, much like if you ever learned to use Bloomberg for the first time, you had to figure out what all the special keyboards were. So we designed a navigation capability like Google.
You basically just start typing what it is you want to do, you want to affect workflow, okay. You want to go ahead and affect accounting capabilities. I want to go ahead and enter an interest rate swap. I can just start typing what it is I want to do, if I could actually spell, and it will navigate you to the function that you want to get to. So we're using intelligent search capability as well to make it to improve the learning curve for our own users and our client users.
But on the predictive analytics side, we're also looking at things that cause issues with respect to data entry, right? So if you think about, in this case, I just brought up an interest rate swap, a cap. Floor. There's a lot of data that typically has to go in to entering this. But if you know if you take a look here quickly, the first thing to note is that there's some fields here that are in red.
Those are called out as being required data entry fields. But down below, if you take a look a little bit further down, there's some fields here that are in blue, the shading is a little bit tough to see on here. But if I mouse over here, the system has actually pre populated some of these values based on a level of confidence. That confidence is determined based on past transactions I've done for this particular client in the database and past positions or trades that we've actually seen. I can set whatever confidence level I want in order to prepopulate the data.
That's a rule in the system. So for example here, the system isn't confident enough to actually give me a strike rate. I had a 70% threshold. Same thing with directions, only 60% confident. But note, once they start giving it more information and it's able to learn more of what I want to do, it's going to get smarter.
So now it was able to predict a rate. By the way, that rate generated the cash flow automatically. Once I accept this particular trade, it will create the entries in the general ledger within the accounting system automatically. And I have full access to be able to view that type of information. So if you think about the power of this around data entry around other instruments, so you look at private equity contracts that have to be structured on the fly and they're unique one off, If you think about real estate transactions and property managers entering appraisal information or rents or maintenance or things that you're going to do on a repetitive basis that can be error prone, we can actually automate that and the system can learn not only across one client, but within our operations outsourcing teams across multiple clients and the intelligence itself can be shared.
So those are some of the areas that we're automating. One other area I'll touch on and then I'll stop is we are also working on things such as collateral management. So areas that are very manual and typically external to the system. So if I wanted to go ahead, for example, and structure a new repo transaction. Let's go in and fill in a bit
of information here.
Okay. Typically, what you would have to do is you would have to go through a process of actually looking for all of the collateral that you have available within your various portfolios in order to determine what you can pledge. So in this particular case, I need $20,000,000 let's say of collateral for this particular repo transaction. Rather than me having to go through that exercise, we've integrated intelligence to optimize that. So we've created a rule that says look across the portfolios, exclude, let's say, anything that isn't AAA that would have a haircut, so I don't want any junk bonds or what in here, and go ahead and search for and present me the list of collateral instruments that will most closely get me to that $20,000,000 notional that are not pledged, that are available automatically.
And it's running through that inventory. And of course, I can go ahead and fine tune that if I wanted to particularly say, let's remove those and I want to go in and say, okay, let's take these particular ones and I can add them. And notice it's keeping a running tally. It's smart enough to know what's already available or what's pledged and how many proceeds are available for me to include. And then once I do that, it will go ahead and mark these as pledged, generate the swift message to the custodian saying, okay, these are now pledged and once the repo is paid down, it will release those again.
But there's a full audit trail within the system. And everything we're doing within here, getting back to efficiency, is all about operational metrics, right? How the people and the users of these systems can do things more efficiently. So we're tracking every action that happens within the system from the point of an issue being identified all the way through to when it's remediated so that we can run operational metrics on how, for example, custodians are doing over the year at resolving trade breaks. And then we can get in front of it.
So we can say, Custodian X is really bad at updating their rates on my derivative instruments. I know that's going to cause a break into my accounting, my portfolio. Let me get in front of it 2 days before. So the best way to resolve an issue is to prevent it from happening in the first place. And those are some of the things we're doing.
This is really just meant to kind of wet your appetite. There's a lot more within the system, and we can certainly talk more about it at your leisure, but we're really excited about the potential for the platform.
Thank you.
Thank you, Scott. And now I'd like to invite Bill, Rahul, Patrick and Norm up for another Q and A session. If you have specific questions for any of the business units, business unit leaders, we can definitely pass them the mic to do the answer.
Brian Essex from Morgan Stanley. Just had a quick question for Mike at DST. I know historically revenue had been really volatile, particularly on the healthcare side of the business. Maybe I don't know if you can give us a little bit of color around what's changed since the company was acquired and how that competitive environment might be different now than it used to be? I have a quick follow-up for Patrick.
Primarily on the health care side of the business, revenue has been really volatile historically. A lot of migrations off the platform, some large deal wins as well. But I was just wondering, in terms of competitive environment, you competed against a lot of larger PBMs and larger healthcare companies. How is that environment different now than it used to be?
So I think a couple of things. I think the historical volatility that DST had had, some of that was driven by M and A activity. So there are a couple big BPO clients that they kind of fell the wrong side of piece of M and A and they had some attrition as a result of that over the last 2 or 3 years. I think on the Healthcare side, right now, we feel pretty optimistic about our opportunity in terms of growing the BPO business, one of the few competitors that does have both robust core claims processing engine as well as the BPO operation. A lot of stuff you've heard on singularity and so on is where areas where we think we can get additional lift in terms of driving more efficiency in our Healthcare business, right?
So the kind of things they do quite similar to what we do really in the hedge fund or other parts of our business, the processing transactions, they're reconciling the counterparties and stuff like that. So we think we get some more operational lift to become more efficient, but it's going to give us more upsell as well and is one of the few providers that has all those capabilities, we're well positioned. On the pharmacy side, a lot of M and A activity taking place there as well. We think actually that's driving some opportunity for us. We're seeing some opportunity.
There's clients that are coming to us that they don't want to be serviced by a competitor, right? And with some of these deals that you've seen in the marketplace, that's starting to happen. So we're getting some inbound traffic, and we've done some proactive calling on 100 plus names that are being serviced by some of those express scripts and so on that are subject to M and A activity. So we see some good opportunities there. And I talked about the revenue per paid claim, pretty good trend there in terms of $0.43 up to $0.52 It's really by providing more richness of services to existing clients, so we can get more lift from the relationships we already have.
Great. Thank you. That's really helpful. And maybe Pat, I guess you've guided to reducing your leverage by, I think, 0.7 turns per year. What's baked into that guidance?
How much confidence do you have? And maybe levers that you might have to accelerate that if certain positions materialize over the next year or so?
I think we're very confident with our ability to delever 0.7x a year in the 1st couple of years. And once we get out of this year and we're out of all the deal transaction costs, we pay that active cash flow. So we think and then we'll be running over $1,000,000,000 of free cash flow. And I think some of the levers that we can pull is we focus a lot on accounts receivable DSO. If we can start getting those down over the next year, they'll generate some additional cash.
We don't need a lot of working capital needs. And then we've got some assets at DST, some noncore investments at DST that we could if we have the opportunity, that we can sell them next year or the year after and use that to pay down debt.
This is Andrew Nicholas from William Blair. I just wanted to talk a little bit about the Singularity opportunity.
Is there any sense you
can give us of maybe what percentage of your current client base would be candidate for that kind of upgrade or from a revenue perspective or even a margin improvement perspective, how we can think about the medium to long term implications of that conversion or that upgrade process? Sure. I'll take that.
I think the way to look at it, so when I look at this year, right, we had to build the software, get it to the point it's sellable to some of the marketplace, get some market validation. And part of market validation is wins, and part of market validation is getting some of my outsourcing customers up and running on it and referenceable. So that's kind of what we've been doing. And now we're trying to measure what the opportunity looks like. We've got a really big pipeline already of software side of our business, where we have primarily licensed software paying in the software side of our business where we have primarily licensed software paying us maintenance, right, a significant portion of the institutional side of that space is a candidate.
We initially targeted insurance and real estate investment trust, but inevitably the market decides what it wants, right? So we are seeing activity across smaller hedge funds. We're seeing activity in smaller asset managers. And I think there's going to be an opportunity over the next 12 months to sell different organization. We actually just entered into a contract with a bank for the FX process.
And so it's pretty broad based. We didn't start this project to build a $50,000,000 a year business, right? So I think this product has tremendous potential across many of our marketplaces over time to be an upgrade path for our customers that go from a maintenance stream to a fully hosted data integration, reconciliation. And those automations we're talking about, we really are beginning to automate much of the accounting process. So whether you buy it on a SaaS basis or you hire us on a fully outsourced basis, we're expected to get paid for the value of that outsourced service, whether it's the technology or the people.
So I think the way to look at it is we'll have a we're going to have revenue this year, which I think is important. I think we'll have a material impact on revenue year in terms of remember, we're a big company, all right? So I'm not going to move the dial for the whole firm. But I think over the next 5 years, this could be I think we have a chance to make it a $500,000,000 business over 5 years.
Awesome. And it's dollars, American
That's helpful. Thank you. And then just a separate topic, maybe a question for Patrick. I think historically, you've talked about being able to generate about 50 basis points of margin expansion for the core business, kind of exclusive or excluding the different synergies you've laid out for DST and some of the new acquisitions. Is that 50 basis point margin expansion number still reasonable?
Or is there maybe some potential upside to that with some of the other initiatives and technology developments you've talked about today?
We think there is the opportunity. If you look at our core business of excluding the recent acquisitions, right, and of improving margins 50 bps a year. I'd expect most of the margin improvement would be in the gross margin line and maybe on the G and A line that we get the leverage there that we'll continue investing in R and D and selling. We wouldn't see it there, but we should be able to continue getting margin expansion in our core business as we automate some of the back office systems and more efficient use offshore capability.
Thanks.
Hey, Patrick, a question. A lot going on, but on a fully pro form a basis, when we look at the revenue stream, what percent of revenue is generated as a basis point spread of assets under management or administration? And then breaking that down further, what percentage would apply directly to, let's say, long only equity assets? And then number 2 is that the negative three percent mark that you took on the hedge fund index in October, what percentage of revenue does that apply to?
I think, I mean, Raul can come into I think what Raul said a while ago that there's about $650,000,000 that directly related price asset under management. That's got some floors and it's got some fixed fees in there too, so it's not all fluctuates based on assets under management. And then at DST, there's about $180,000,000 ALPS business, I think it's somewhere around $180,000,000 the ALPS business, of which $40,000,000 of that is fund administration and the rest is an asset manager. So they're clearly impacted by assets under management also. So that's about the extent of what's affected by priced assets under management.
Yes. And I think the thing I would add, Pete, is that 3% drawdown or whatever it is. Look, the things that aren't in there are new client wins or other things that are happening in our business. So our view of what that does to revenue is it's really pretty insignificant.
Okay, great. And then just a follow-up on that organic growth question. DST will represent about half of the revenue stream next year, goes into the organic growth calculation in April. And I guess my view is there's probably a high likelihood next year DST generates probably negative 1% to positive 1% organic growth. So all in, in terms of setting expectations of where you think the Street should be as we head into 2019 guidance?
Just maybe a midpoint of 3.25%, 3.5% sound about right with the range of 2 to 5% for organic growth?
I mean, I don't really think that we would be that pessimistic. I think we'd still be that we would target 5%, but probably, as I said, that's now kind of the high end. So I think it's probably going to be somewhere between 3.5 to 5. Know, and I think a lot of it will depend upon these opportunities we have at DST now. These things get momentum.
And if you can get some momentum and if we can drive $15,000,000 $20,000,000 out of Singularity, we can drive a bunch of stuff out of some of the other initiatives that we have going on. Obviously, lease business is growing at 8% or 9%, but that won't be organic, right? So but there's a lot of things that we would that we have as levers. And I think it's once again, is that there's still I think we said $220,000,000 to $240,000,000 in synergy capabilities on DST. That if it's $40,000,000 that's a lot of earnings that you need to make sure you go get.
And so I think it gives Mike time to build out the team that he's going to have as a sales force. The deals in DST are lumpy and large. So the predictability of it, if you look at the 10 year compound annual growth rate of our revenue and our earnings, I don't think that's really going to change. And we can nitpick in 2028 about how come we're only at 45,000,000,000 dollars and only at about $16,000,000,000 in EBITDA, it really ought to be at $16,100,000,000 Those predictabilities are every time I tell people that I think we're going to grow 5 times, they look at me like I'm nuts. But that's what's happened.
You know, and we get we retain the smartest people in this business. There's $100,000,000,000 in financial record keeping industry in the United States, and there's probably another $100,000,000,000 outside the United States. Right now, we're at 4.5 percent. There's a lot of opportunity. And we're not the ones nervous.
The rest of the industry is nervous. It's like Mattis says, I sleep well. I make other people sleep poorly.
Thank you. Andrew Schmidt from Citi.
A question
for Christie. You talked about platform consolidations, the theme for asset managers and that's been talked about for some time.
Has there been anything
in terms of your conversations with clients to indicate that that trend has accelerated and asset managers are thinking more meaningfully about consolidating their tech stacks? And then maybe flip it over to Norm and ask you if Singularity is scalable can help sort of solve this problem for mid to larger size asset managers or what the approach is from just a technology solution
perspective?
So yes, I think it is accelerating. I think that part of that is you can talk about it for so long and not do anything about it and then eventually you have to do something about it. And I think all these organizations are feeling depending on what market segment you're in, they're feeling a lot of cost pressures and a lot of fee pressure, right? And so those things are, although consolidation has been talked about for quite some time that so there's a more recent fee compression focus in some of the markets that we're seeing. So I think that both the fee compression and time has taken is creating a greater urgency today than it has been in the past.
Okay. So I think your question is will Singularity benefit people who have many products as a result of consolidation and ability to rationalize their products. Is that correct? That's correct, yes. I think the answer is yes.
And I think when you start looking just at the security side, whether it's your fixed income portfolio, your equity portfolio, SS and C has its own specialized derivatives portfolio. But now we have a single system that does all the derivatives and the fixed income and the equities, right? We have specialized limited partnership capability. These are separate technologies. So for even my own customers, the ability to rationalize within SSD's own portfolio into rationalize within SSD's own portfolio into a single solution set is there.
So for the and this large customer in New York, they've also got a private equity portfolio that's not on our system. That's a long term opportunity when we build that out. They have a mortgage loan capability. They have a real estate property management capability. So the vision of organizations being able to rationalize their technology stacks into a single platform, that's what Singularity is all about in one way.
And as I mentioned earlier in my presentation, that's a very high value capability to these large organizations. The real value is going to be the artificial intelligence really applied in a way that makes an operational impact and the ability to increase the knowledge and understanding of the information that these guys are producing versus it balances and I'm done, right? So I think that's why it's got so much potential. My clients really see the consolidation as its primary benefit right now because I don't think they fully understand its true potential yet. That's our job to articulate that.
But alone, that consolidation saves these guys a ton of money and a ton of error rates in their organization and a bunch of key man risks on key technologies and processes.
The other thing on what Christy said is that if you've been out in this business long enough, you realize that the business consolidates and it splinters. So if you go back to Wells Fargo Advisors, for instance, they bought A. G. Edwards, I think 7 years ago, and A. G.
Edwards had 6,900 brokers. I think that's about right. And now my friends that are in Wells Fargo Advisors has told me they had 7 year retention plans. Well, now the retention plans are over. And so they splinter into all these RIAs that Rob Rowley gets to sell and Christie gets to sell and a bunch of things that we get to sell because their big gold handshake was a 7 year gold handshake, and now they're all deciding.
And the number of new RIAs that are just coming out of Wells Fargo is, I bet, 100, right? So those things are all opportunities for us. And it's happened for the last since I've been at this for 30, 40 years. It happened with Merrill Lynch. It happened with Wells Fargo.
It's happened with Morgan Stanley. It's going to stay the same. It's just that if you pay, you double, you stay. And as soon as they go back to the normal rate card, people leave.
And then perhaps it's a brief follow-up for Patrick. Is there an opportunity to with the debt stack to do swaps or fix some of the debt in a or more apply more of a fixed rate, especially in a rising interest rate environment here?
Well, yes, I mean, you can swap get a swap and fix the rate. I mean the problem is, it's going to cost you 100 bps to do that, right? I think 100 bps on our debt right now is probably something like $80,000,000 of interest. So I think our view is we've been better off traditionally just focusing on paying down the debt as quick as possible and reducing the leverage. And so our view is we'll just take the chance with the market versus fixing something and having it cost us $80,000,000 even if we fix half of it, it will cost us 40,000,000 dollars So that's our current view.
And we generate a lot of cash and so we're not like teetering on this leverage, right? I mean, after we service the debt, we're going to generate over $1,000,000,000 worth of cash next year. So we've got a good safety margin. So our view right now is we'll monitor the market. We keep looking at the swaps.
We'll keep looking at it. Maybe there'll be an opportunity to get something at reasonable prices, but we think it's pretty expensive, right?
We're going to Wall Street to get a reasonable price.
We will never get it. Or maybe when the yield curve comes down a little bit or something, right? Because they're pricing everything at that yield curve and it never happens.
Go ahead.
Alex Kramm, UBS again. I guess a couple of questions. First one for Jeff on the S side. Sorry if you can't get out of there. But can you just actually run through the revenue model a little bit because I don't know if we've really had a chance to dig into that.
So I apologize if we have. But I know there's in the OMS, EMS space, there's a lot of different ways, I guess, people get paid. Like sometimes the buy side pays like a fee and then the brokers will pay a fee. And you mentioned volume sensitivity yourself. So maybe you can just break out the revenue buckets a little bit in terms of what we should be watching in terms of what asset class in terms of volumes or willingness for buy side to pay themselves, brokers fighting back on pricing?
So anything there would be helpful.
Sure. Happy to do that. So if you look at our business model, there's essentially kind of 3 major lines to it. So the first is software that the buy side pays for directly. And if you looked at last year's revenue, we were about 280,000,000 dollars about 123,000,000 of that came from the buy side.
So that is 100% subscription paid monthly by the clients with very high, very sticky revenue there. On the sell side connectivity piece, the second component of our model is you've got the buy side asset managers and then we've got a connectivity model with all of their counterparties in terms of how where they're trading. And last year, we generated about $110,000,000 in revenue from that. And that was it's about 70% usage based. So that does fluctuate with the market.
But when you think about and then the last component is our EMS business, which generates about $45,000,000 $47,000,000 in revenue and subscription paid by the sell side. So those are the 3 components. There's only that piece with the sell side connectivity that fluctuates with volume. One of the nice components here is that it is countercyclical. So a lot of times where you see when assets are going up, you see these periods of lower volatility.
We're actually coming out of a period of where we've seen historic low levels of think about where you think volatility is going from here. I think given where it's been, it's likely on an upswing, how high and for how long, I think will be the question. But when you think about it, it's about 70% of 30% of our revenue, so like 20% overall, this fluctuates with market volume,
if that
makes sense?
It's mostly equities, right? What's that? Across all asset classes?
It is it's primarily on equity and equity derivatives. So it's we do have smaller pieces where they're more fixed when you're trading other asset classes, but it's primarily in equity and equity derivatives.
And then secondly, this is not more Excellent. Thank you. So you can Again, no, in terms of pricing in general, since we were just on that topic a little bit, just give us an update about pricing across the business. I mean, you have a lot of new businesses now. I remember last year at one point, I think, Bill, you even mentioned that in the core hedge fund administration business, they as the key provider you may even have some pricing power, but I don't think we have had an update for that.
So across the whole business, where do you think you can actually take a little bit of pricing? Obviously, the environment is not that great, but maybe how many points I can add over time and in what areas?
Well, I mean, again, right, we have some pricing power. Most of the people that use us, if we wanted to raise the price half a basis point or a basis point, they'd probably you know, swallow and take it, right? But at the same time, you know, bulls make money and bears make money and pigs get slaughtered, right? So you've got to be sensitive to what you're doing. We're running pretty strong margins.
As Patrick said, we can probably pick up 50 basis points in margin improvement, and I can assure you that Patrick doesn't operate in highly optimistic numbers. So I might have picked a little higher target, but I just think that we're trying to run the business so that we have world class margins and we get world class cash flow, and then we start driving world class revenue. But again, it comes back to we like earnings and cash flow. So DST has something called the OOPS, out of pocket expenses, that the revenue and the expense is the same. We think that's a lousy business, right?
So we want to get out of oops because we think it's oops, right? So it's those kinds of things. It's not that big.
What is it about? $30,000,000 a quarter or somewhere around there.
Yes, dollars 100,000,000 worth of you know how much margin we get on that? It's called 0, right? So we don't do that kind of stuff. We're not your mail room. I don't want to put stamps on we got all these high class people.
Probably know what a stamp is. So we're trying to buy high value products, right? High requirement, complex, difficult that our clients don't want to do. That is the value proposition that we bring across the range of our products and services.
And we can probably take questions from 1 or 2 more people, if there's anything.
Just a couple of questions on Intralinks. The first, based on some of the publicly available data on Intralinks, it does appear that over the last 2 years, they took margins from kind of the mid teens to the high 30s and with your synergy target maybe taking it into the low 40s. Were there initiatives like big initiatives going on at Intralinks that have been discontinued? Or can you kind of put some buckets around some of those significant cost reductions?
So the data is accurate. The way I would frame it is, there were not big initiatives that we slowed down or stopped. We had our own oops. To use Bill's commentary there, we had in a prior period of the company's history, we had been pursuing a very different strategy that brought us out of our core markets and we were pursuing horizontal file sharing across the enterprise. That is a set of markets that Intralinks, in my opinion, is not well suited to pursue, is not in a market leadership position, cannot go dominate and win.
And so, 24 months or so ago, as I assume control of the business fully, I began a repositioning. That repositioning has been accelerated by being taken private. And now we have margins, which are well back into a healthy range, in line with what SS and C is expecting today and puts us into a position where we actually have more operational efficiency to go drive once we are a part of the SS and C family. That will be accelerated and then hopefully open up the opportunity for us to aggressively invest into our core markets, which will drive that innovation powered growth, which I think this team is very much in line with because it opens up a lot of these very synergistic opportunities.
Okay. And then maybe Bill or Patrick, but with the SS and C share price coming in with the market here, is there any way to change the relative mix of cash and debt on the Intralinks deal?
I don't think so. Intralinks is imminent, right? So and once again, right, if you have patients, I know that's a great quality in this group, but you can't sit there and try to make a baby in a month with 9 women. That doesn't the world doesn't work that way. And we cut that deal.
Frank Baker, who I cut that deal with, is a great guy, and we got a great business with Leaf and his team. And I think that I couldn't be really much more bullish if earnings matter. I mean, I don't know that earnings matter to you guys anymore, but if they do, I'm pretty sanguine about our ability to pay down debt. I'm pretty perhaps raise our dividend, perhaps buy back shares. We have all kinds of ways to cash is king, and we're going to generate tons and tons of cash, and we're going to have moderate CapEx expenses.
And if anything, I don't see a competitor to us that is doing it way we're doing it, which is taking really high quality functional expertise, back to an accountant that really knows what an investment interest rate swap is and can do T accounts, right, like real accounting, right, that it works, have it balances. A lot of people are going to start throwing numbers up against them all, they've never balanced. We've got people that really understand it, and then you put them with technologists, and then you put them with some of the newest and I've been at this since 'eighty 6. Really, all the systems between camera, which we built in 'eighty seven, PAM, which was built in 'eighty five, 'eighty six, Semcorp, Eagle, all of them, all Sunguard's products, they're all the same until now. Now is the first time that you're getting to use technology that's not client server architecture, All right, you can call it cloud or Internet or whatever you want it.
It's been around for a long time. It's got different names because the technology companies are the smartest marketers there are. But reality is, is this is the first time we don't use humans. This is the first time where you have intelligent process design that's really has human like, like HAL. Course, none of you know the 2000 and 1 of Space Odyssey, but HAL was the computer guy that kind of took over.
And that's what's really coming to, right? It's really smart. You watch it compare those files, okay, that's a simple process, I understand that. But it does it so much faster Humans could do it with so fewer errors that that's what's going to happen. And we're not only putting money into it.
It's not the money, we're putting whatever it takes. But it's the Norm Bollinger, it's the Tom McMacken, it's Mark Zimmerman, it's the Scott Kerlin, it's the Zoh, it's the who's the database manager on this, it's the Diane Kaufman, it's all these experts, and they're motivated. I mean, they're really motivated. And now Norm stuck out a $500,000,000 number for me. I was going to be a little more conservative.
Not really.
I said we had the potential. We have a real chance.
I've already booked it.
I'm not into implied revenue either.
Not yet, but we're learning.
I think that's a good place to end. Everyone, I hope you had a great day, and it was very informative. We've some food outside. We've got some demos going on. Grab these guys on their way out if you would like to.
And thank