Andrea Gentilini is head of SEI Novus, SEI’s investment analytics and portfolio management solution for institutional investors

The past decade has been defined by fintechs providing institutional investors with tools to help improve their investment processes. The result was the mass proliferation of new vendors and the birth of so-called software as a service, an innovation boom driven less by inventing and commercialising new analytical frameworks as moving apps onto the cloud.

SaaS saved sellers significant deployment costs, while buyers adopted central processes where multiple users hit the same endpoint. The surge in new, easily accessible solutions was met with strong demand from the industry, which had historically viewed technology as secondary to success.