Morgan Stanley launches investment distribution platform with help from SS&C.

Morgan Stanley has tapped SS&C Fund Services to provide administration and accounting services for its FX Gateway platform, launched in October.

Morgan Stanley will act as FX prime broker and distributor for FX Gateway,
a multi-manager platform aimed at providing institutional investors access to select currency managers. In turn, the platform seeks to provide currency managers with a more diversified investor base.

With institutional clients increasingly attracted to FX markets as an asset class, FX Gateway enables them to access managers with demonstrated currency investment expertise, thereby making the investment process more efficient, according to Morgan Stanley.

For its initial phase, FX Gateway is expected to have between ten to fifteen managers on the platform.  C-View and The Cambridge Strategy were the first two managers, and a further seven were scheduled to be added before the end of 2011.

SS&C will provide transaction processing, prime broker and counterparty reconciliation services and deliver performance and liquidity reporting on a daily basis through its web portal, SSCFundServices.com.

“Morgan Stanley launched a platform for access to FX managers who trade spots, forwards, exotic currency and plain vanilla currency options,” Rahul Kanwar, senior vice president at SS&C, told Markets Media. “Our job is to handle operations and accounting for this platform, assist in processing all investor transactions as well as interact with underlying investment managers, and interface with Morgan Stanley to provide reporting and reconciliation.”

The platform is unique “in the fact that its highly tech intensive,” Kanwar said.  “The timelines for providing valuations and reports are very compressed. We’re able to leverage our experience in both fund administration and software.”

SS&C will deploy its technology in a cloud-based manner over the Web or on mobile devices to allow investors and fund managers to view positions and daily P&L statements, he said.

As the administrator, SS&C will ensure independence of net asset value calculations and to leverage their technology expertise to maximize operational efficiency.

“Our ability to deploy a very scalable and yet very customized solution both in terms of people and technology and tight integration with Morgan Stanley systems led to our winning this mandate,” said Kanwar.