Relief, so on and so forth. What are some of these recent announcements? Obviously, you captured a lot of the new AI technology capabilities that are out there, but how did you think about the strategy in terms of targeting what your clients were asking for? What was kind of the theme of some of your releases?
I think that it's a great question because if you're not careful, you're trying to solve almost everything, right? I mean, there's no—and focus in those things is pretty important. We tend to listen more than we talk when it comes to those kinds of things, right? We tend to just try to understand where the biggest pain points are, where the biggest opportunities are. That's one part of it. I think the other part of it, coming back to, we have the world's biggest fund administration business. We've got the world's biggest transfer agency business. We've got the world's best portfolio accounting system for alternatives.
We've got lots of examples internally where we see millions and millions and millions of workflows happening every single day, week, month, year. We get a good sense of, "Hey, you know what?
It turns out that credit agreement scrubbing really is an issue, right? Or when people call into one of our customer service hubs, it's taking them a little too long to get an answer, or whatever the case may be, right? That becomes what you tend to focus your automation efforts on.
Let's talk a little bit about recent results, just recap, and maybe we could tease out what were some of the items that you believe drove the quarter and what were some of the main drivers there?
Yeah. We had a pretty good quarter in Q3, and I think it was really driven by strong revenue growth at some of our biggest businesses, over 9% growth in both our global business and our GIDS, Global Investor and Distribution Solutions business. Those two together account for over 50% of our revenue. Strong growth there is important. We also had margin expansion in the quarter, and I think that is attributed to just we're always paying attention to costs and making sure that we are efficient. We have this big kind of AI and automation push throughout our organization that really allows us to both invest in where we see the need, whether that's R&D or sales and marketing, but to essentially keep headcount flat and grow our revenues without growing our expense base at the same place.
I want to take you to each one of those areas individually, but start with GlobeOp. That business model, what are some of the exciting growth opportunities that you're seeing that are going to help for that?
Yeah. GlobeOp itself, it's the largest alternative fund administrator in the world, and we really have the crème de la crème of our hedge fund clients, and they performed really well this quarter, which helped drive some of the higher growth this quarter than what we were saying before, 7% or 8%. They came back to 9.6% in Q3. We also continue to see strong growth in private markets, so that's where we've got private equity, private assets, real assets, private credit. That's been growing in the double digits pretty consistently for the past couple of years. And then kind of the newest piece of the business, the smallest piece, is also the fastest growing in retail alternatives, growing over 20%.
Really, we have a unique offering where we are both the fund accounting and the transfer agency services that are required to account for all of the retail investors that are now getting into the alternatives. We think that this is a—there's a lot of runway ahead for these types of funds. Everyone wants to get into alternatives, so high-net-worth individuals want an avenue to be able to invest in alternatives and get those kind of returns. We think that that's a great business, and we see kind of continued growth from that.
Yeah. It seems like you're doing something well. We hear it across our coverage. Frankie asked us the other day about your system. It's a huge opportunity, and we're hearing it in multiple quarters of our coverage. It seems like that's a position as well.
Yeah. We're the only ones that provide both of those services, so.
Great. I do want to talk a little bit about GIDS. And Sydney out with the benefits of GIDS's organic growth rate early through the first half of 2026. Maybe you could discuss some other factors that you're excited about in the segment to continue that growth rate on many single digits, higher than the low single digit expectations that I think perhaps you were realizing.
Pretty neat story.
Are there specific areas that you're excited about, opportunities, and type of?
There are. Some of it is we've done a lot of work in particular to try to strengthen our competitive positioning in this business over the last any number of years, four or five years for sure. We have a lot of confidence in that management team. We've got the sales teams organized the way we want them. We've got product development and innovation the way we want it. We have spent a significant amount of time with our customers understanding where their requirements are, right? These things do not happen by accident.
You do not go from one set of performance to a different set of performance without having to do something. We feel like what we've done is laid a foundation that is really in a pretty good spot.
That's being validated in the market with wins like great big institutional places like Insignia that have lots of choices and run detailed RFPs and do their diligence in a fair amount of detail. It's also being validated every single day in what we see in terms of the opportunities that we have, the pipeline that we have, the RFPs that we're participating in. We've got a fair amount of confidence that what we have here is a business that will continue to perform well. Some of the reasons are for most of our customers that are in the money management business, right?
That can take a lot of different forms, from institutional managers to retirement plans. It sort of doesn't matter. One of the biggest things that they're very focused on is the end client experience, right?
Somebody logs into a web portal, somebody calls in somewhere, somebody goes on a mobile app, somebody talks to a financial advisor. What's that experience like? How rich is that experience? Is it differentiated? What they're increasingly finding is technology is moving so fast that the best way to get that differentiation is to do it at scale, which means that we are now being exposed to outsourcing opportunities that we have not traditionally. Folks with lots and lots of internal systems are saying, "Hey, I know I got to bring all this together. I know I need a generational upgrade. Rather than try to do it all by myself, why do I not get some help and see if I can retain that configurability that I'm really looking for, but get a lot of scale?" That has been really good for GIDS. It is a global business.
Half the revenue comes from outside the U.S. Lots of money.
Thinking about some of the challenges that are implementing the radical change to some of these outsourced techniques that you're starting with, and also talking about the success rate you're having in the RFP process and the engagement rate there, how are some of your clients getting by on communication, timing, getting that all mapped out?
It's obviously a really important part of the process because large projects, large-scale projects, implementation is sort of both the key risk as well as the key opportunity if you can get really good at it. One of the things that has helped us with some of the bigger ones is this lift-out concept, right? In effect, what we're doing is we're accepting the current operation as is, and we're keeping it going. We already have on day one, we have the people, we have the systems, we have the revenue, right? What that does is it takes some of the—it's not that the work does not have to get done. It still has to get done, but it gives you a lot more flexibility as to which pieces you incorporate at which points in the cycle, and you're getting the economic benefit through it.
Sounds like having an MVP product to start, right? Then you can iterate from that point on.
Exactly. That's good to hear that.
Yeah. For sure. I do want to look at—let's talk a little bit about looking into the future here. I'm just curious if you could talk at a real high level about some of your—how you feel about organic growth ability for each of your business units. You talked about—why don't we start with wealth and investment technology companies to talk about the trend?
Yeah. So Wealth and Investment Technologies, the WIT business, is really where we kind of house a lot of our financial services software. We have different kind of verticals within there. If you think about it, the alternatives business within WIT, that's where we have our Geneva product, which is really widely regarded as the best of the best in portfolio accounting for large asset managers, hedge funds, and fund administrators. That continues to kind of hold that place, and it continues to grow nicely. The next big piece of the WIT business would be Wealth, our Black Diamond Wealth Platform. Again, continues to do really well and is probably the largest kind of provider in the RIA space. We have a partnership with Morningstar where, as they are kind of decommissioning one of their offerings, we are making the migration to Black Diamond very seamless.
I think we've won over 400 clients from Morningstar this past year to get on the Black Diamond Platform. That has been going really well, and we think that is going to continue to drive growth for the Black Diamond Platform into 2026. We've got our insurance offering in Singularity that continues to grow really well. We have a couple of competitors in that space that might not be quite as strong in kind of recent quarters and is going through some disruption. I think that is something that we can take advantage of. Lastly, we have kind of our traditional investment management space, which, look, is a crowded field competitively.
We think we have a really strong offering in our newest Geneva solution that has all the bells and whistles of new technology that is really based on the functional expertise that we've built over the years. Wealth investment technologies, to sum it up, we think is a mid-single digit grower in the whole, and a lot of it is dependent on renewal cycles and license deals and things like that. It can look pretty lumpy, but we have pretty good visibility into the future for that.
Is the strategy of the—does you end on a festive free basis, or is it a whole ecosystem or a platform kind of approach to win deals on the whole platform?
It's a little bit of both. Increasingly, and some of it is a function of who we are as a company. Increasingly, the most important deals for us are one where we can have a package of a lot of different parts of our business, right? They may be interested in—in particular, they may be interested in Black Diamond. They may also be interested in our trust accounting, which is what we call Trust Suite. They may overlap that and look at our model capabilities at Alps Advisors. In some cases, they may also have separately managed accounts or funds that we're doing fund administration for. There are a lot of different things.
The most important things—folks don't understand, sometimes don't often appreciate how deep and complicated some of these businesses can get and how many asset classes they're in and how grand their ambitions are. The fact that we've got this wealth of products and services that we can offer has been a big advantage for us.
We tend to think that it's not one size fits all for these types of systems. We have purpose-built solutions for industry verticals that we think that we know that insurance companies need this certain type of accounting system. We know that alternatives need something different. They do not need the same thing. That is kind of how we've approached the market.
Yeah. In the Intralinks business, how are we feeling about the organic opportunity that?
Yeah. Look, we feel really good about the organic opportunity at Intralinks. If you kind of just a little historical context, we bought Intralinks in 2018. And for many of those years, it's been one of our best-grown businesses, right? It's somewhat correlated to the M&A markets and what the M&A markets do, and we understand that. At the same time, the underlying product is about as strong as it's ever been. There's been a lot of work done in terms of new generations of both the virtual data room as well as the alternatives, the investor reporting platforms. There's more AI infusion there. There's a lot more service capabilities around setting up data rooms and privacy processing and redaction and all kinds of things like that. The fundamentals are really strong.
What we're starting to see as the market comes back is we're starting to see that reflected in the numbers.
The previous couple of years ago, I guess you covered some of your competitors in this area. Curious, how are you thinking about the M&A cycle and the issuing cycle at this point? Perhaps maybe a little bit of.
I think our early indicators on—so we track what we call opportunity creation and deal count and things like that. Things that are pretty early in the M&A life cycle process. All of those indicators over the last, let's say, six weeks, eight weeks or so have been trending positive.
Very last question.
Yeah.
Had a big picture. Let's talk a little bit about intelligent automation and analytics and move on to healthcare. Again, the organic opportunity there.
I think we talked about it a little bit at the beginning with what we're rolling out with our agentic AI capabilities and how we are providing those to our clients. I think the consultative approach, the SS&C as Customer Zero is what we're calling it. We pretty much can build and test everything on ourselves. Then we look at our clients and our prospects and we're like, "You guys have a similar problem. This is what we did with credit agreements. How can we apply this to your business specifically?" We've already had some successes with these AI agent sales, and the pipeline is building. I think we see some positive momentum going in for that intelligent automation analytics business.
I'm personally excited to ask this question. The Calastone acquisition, can you put a little bit high level on what this business does, what it brings to SS&C, and how do you think this enhances the ETF and market risk for the assets category?
Look, I think the Calastone does a few different things, but probably one of the most important ones is it's a network, right? It is a network with about 4,500 or so participants that facilitates the process of individuals investing in investment organizations, right? Very simply. If you kind of look at that traditional ecosystem where it's custodians and it's financial advisors and it's the end clients and it's the fund manager groups and things like that, and then the various flows and the movement of paper and the movement of information, it turns that all into an electronic process, right? Like most networks, its strength is how many participants it has, right?
Part of our thesis is that in addition to the 4,500 or so that Calastone already has, we've got 23,000-24,000 customers, many of whom are likely going to be interested, and we're seeing that already. That is one part of it. I think the other part of it is there's a number of things that our clients are interested in, whether it's things like tokenization, so taking funds and selling tokens and making that a far more seamless process. Calastone has a fair amount of technology already built around tokenization. We have seen already in our experience with Calastone in the past that some of their cash management tools and their web portals are really attractive to our customers. We have customers that are using them now and implementing some of those now. We think we can do more of that.
There's a fair amount of overlap with our GIDS business, and all of it just really comes down to investment accounting, investment processing, investment workflows need to become more and more electronic, right? We want to be at the forefront of that.
Got it. Imagine a lot of such a new industry bringing that level of professionalism for that. Imagine this is, correct me if I'm wrong, a cross-sell opportunity really as going from stratified starts opening up the assets investment for our customers and getting the opportunity to sell that.
Exactly.
It's good to hear the strengths of these things that you're sharing. Interesting.
I would say that at least from my seat with investors, we've been talking about tokenization for the past five years, but really in the past six months, the conversations have increased.
Are there opportunities to partner on the tokenization side?
There are, mostly with customers. Mostly we have customers that want to—they're wanting pilots and they're setting up funds. That is probably our biggest opportunity.
Okay. Let's pivot to international growth and some of the priorities for SS&C. Maybe you talk a little bit about how these acquisitions like Pure Electronic Services are contributing to the global market.
I think we've been seeing a lot of international growth over the past couple of years. Australia has been a big market for us with some key client wins. We have been building up that business in Australia for a number of years, and it's really kind of taken off in the past 12 months or so. I would say we continue to see, especially within our GIDS business, a lot of strength in Europe and the U.K. in particular. The Middle East, we've opened a few offices in the Middle East that are really servicing for both our wealth investment technology business, but also fund administration business servicing some of those big sovereign wealth funds, which we still see a lot more opportunity going forward. Curo Fund Services, we acquired. That's South African-based.
Again, it kind of gives us a local presence in the South African market, so it opens up some opportunities there. Just talking about Calastone, they really are a global network, and they have touchpoints across all continents. I think in particular, Asia-Pac and Latin America and Brazil give us more presence in those areas.
It sounds like some organic efforts really into the intensity of the international.
Yes.
Okay. So you are developing more agentic AI in your own business. You have begun some of those internally. Just curious if you could share some of the examples of some events that AI developments that you've had internally and then you're planning to scale the investor side.
Sure. We have—and because it's such a hot area, it changes every day, right? If we had this conversation a week from now, I probably have a couple of different examples or additional examples. In particular, if you kind of look at the businesses that obviously we do a fair amount of processing, healthcare is one of them. In healthcare, we just recently deployed an agent that helps radiologists. In effect, it does some of the processing, pre-processing. We think in the one client organization that we deployed, it's going to save them 15,000 radiologist hours each year, which is really powerful because we're talking about highly skilled people that have—obviously there's limitations to how much supply we have. Similarly, within SS&C and with our customers, we're doing a fair amount of work in credit and the documentation-related credit.
That's been a fair amount of it. We're doing a fair amount of work as it relates to managing customers, dialing into customer support kind of organizations and the workflows. Somebody calls and says, "Hey, I have this trust now, and I need to transfer my assets, and what are the steps?" That used to be a very human kind of procedural kind of process. What you find is if you can train the technology on enough use cases, you actually can give it control, right? You can say, "All right, you know what? Here's a goal. Here's the goal I want to accomplish, and here's a set of parameters, and go do it." We're finding that it's mind-boggling how quickly that is coming along.
What I imagine is you add more and more projects as you scale, those learning learnings are advantage.
That's right. That's the advantage, right? The advantage of when Justine talks about we call ourselves Customer Zero, the advantage is that there's pitfalls to this stuff too, right? You got to be really careful. Governance is truly important to us. We built our own governance product. We think the first of its kind so that we're trying to do all of this in a really carefully controlled way. Having lots of examples of it working well makes the system smarter.
Sure. Sure. Maybe you could talk about how AI automation is able to differentiate across the market. Is that your edge right now, or is it actually the capability?
I think it's the—I would say it's more of the latter. We're not always—and this is true for AI, but it's true for most of these things. We're not really trying to be the ones who invent whatever the latest way to deploy AI. What we are trying to do is say, "Hey, deep in our workflows, deep in the things that our customers care about, is a lot of complexity. It's hard to understand. It's hard to process. There are institutional frameworks that have been built up over decades." Our customers, when they look at AI, are not just looking at, "Gee, that's pretty cool. I can go get ChatGPT to summarize my history paper," right? That's a great use case, but that's not the one we have, right?
The one we have much more is, "Hey, I've got 25 applications right now in my back office or my front office, and I need to find some way to integrate the applications, pull the data, get real insights out of them, and then use that to do some kind of processing that maybe is hard for me to do today." The integrations are really important. The security is really important. The fact that it's tried and tested is really important because a lot of times we're talking about customer data, right? We're talking about things that they have an obligation to safeguard. The barriers to entry become that much higher. That's where we play.
I think that's right. You hear that fast follow-up is kind of like the way to go in this approach. We actually heard from a non-related company that we cover, like, "Yeah, we're able to sell our AI solutions." Clients loved it. They were super impressed. It got stopped at the legal department because of the use of customer data, things like that. The legal department's writing the rules as we speak. It is a really interesting development how so many different areas are tied into the market for the use of that product.
And we.
Sorry, Justine.
We made a big investment with this with Blue Prism when we acquired it in 2022. I think the use cases for AI, we both can use it internally and have it started out with RPA, and it has evolved into a more intelligent automation and AI-driven automation. There are both internal efficiencies and cost savings that we use in our big outsourcing and services department. Those same automations and efficiencies that we're achieving help us be a better offering to our client in that sense. It helps our GIDS business, and it helps our robot business with client wins because what we are providing is a better, more efficient, more accurate service. We turn around and we take what we've done internally and build it, and we can sell it and generate revenue directly from those AI-powered services.
That sounds very compelling. Just curious, how do you see the pipeline conversion playing out and implementing these tools and getting them to work? I'm sure there are bumps in the road for everybody trying to implement this technology. From your perspective, how do you see that pipeline conversion kind of efforts improving or?
Look, the.
Every client's different.
Every client is different. The challenge to these kinds of things, right, is who's the sponsor within the customer organization, right? A lot of times when you kind of talk about emerging technologies, sponsor is the IT department. The IT departments are really important in a lot of places. What we find, what we have is in addition to the IT department, we have business sponsors, executives, folks that are in operations, folks that are in the financial part of the organization because to them, they can see the functional advantages, right? It is not a, "Here's a science project. Let's make sense of it someday." It says, "Okay, you're already doing reconciliations, and I just lost three people in my reconciliations department. Can we get this in tomorrow?" That is one part of it. The second part of it is we're blessed.
We've got a worldwide sales force that's out there talking to prospects and customers every day. They're not necessarily just talking about AI. They're talking about fund administration and GIGS and a bunch of other things. This is sort of a very natural thing to include in that process. It is a lot easier to develop the pipeline.
That sounds super interesting. It's almost like any type of enterprise can use your capacity. I like this kind of swarm going at the very least a sponsorship within an organization. That's pretty compelling. Let's talk about capital allocation a little bit here. Your leverage remains very manageable even after finding the cash flow to deal with that. Balancing certainly appears to be strong. Can you talk about how you think about balancing further acquisitions or some of your other capital allocation plans?
Yeah. We have strong cash flow characteristics. Look, we're always looking at acquisitions. With our leverage being pretty reasonable, we're not constrained. We don't have any really financial constraints or any management bandwidth constraints to do any really size acquisition. If it were to come across the desk and we would be interested in it, I would say that we are picky. We have metrics like revenue growth of creative. We'd like them to be able, if they're not currently at our corporate average margins, a path to get to corporate average margins within a reasonable time frame. Look, how does it fit within our business? Can we cross-sell across the customer bases? Does it provide something that our clients would want to buy or kind of the qualitative things that we look at?
Absent acquisitions, I would say that we are still, we have a share buyback authorization in place that we are putting to use and will continue to use, especially feeling like our stock is undervalued. At the margins, we'll pay down debt every quarter.
Sure. I'm just going to talk about the solid financial framework in terms of the value-added potential acquisitions. When you think a little bit more on the strategic side, do investors think about the opportunity there more scale versus capability? How are we thinking about those two areas when you're talking about the strategic?
There is a lot of different businesses, so the answer is probably not the same in everyone. I'd say maybe a few different categories. One is we are absolutely looking to extend the service offering every chance we get, right? That may be buying something like PATEO, which complements our fund administration business with class action processing. It may be buying something like Curo, which then gives us an entry into a market where there are likely other customers we can go and get. That is a big part of it. Capability set is also important. We put Calastone maybe in that category where, hey, it is a slightly different set of capabilities than what we have today, but there is overlap. Maybe the thing that ties them all together is we do feel like with 23,000 customers in financial services and healthcare, we've got this unique opportunity.
If we can find more things that they're interested in, that ought to just drive growth. That really is, I think, what brings us all together.
I think we're coming up on time right here.
Rahul, Justine, thank you so much for coming. Very insightful. Thank you very much.
Thank you.