An administration giant for alternative asset managers is ramping up its presence on the liquid side, thanks to a recent, multi-billion-dollar deal.

On April 16, Windsor, Connecticut-based SS&C Technologies Holdings closed on its planned acquisition of Kansas City, Missouri-based DST Systems, a $5.4-billion deal unveiled in January. Several top DST executives, including president and CEO Steve Hooley, left DST as part of the deal, and SS&C managing director Mike Sleightholme took over as head of DST and of financial services and healthcare solutions. Sleightholme, co-head of SS&C's global hedge fund services businesses, sees "a tremendous amount of revenue synergy" between SS&C's back-office work in the alternatives space and DST's work on the mutual fund side of the business.

According to DST's final annual report as an independent company, as of December 31, 2017, DST processed 106.5 million "domestic mutual fund shareowner accounts" (including IRAs, 529s, and more). And DST's Alps arm had $18.4 billion in AUM and $225.9 billion in AUA.

"We're very excited about the complementary capabilities that we have," Sleightholme tells MFWire. "We think there's a tremendous amount of revenue synergy and opportunity."

SS&C is "the biggest alternatives administrator in the world", Sleightholme says, and DST has "huge market share in the traditional recordkeeping and brokerage subaccount relationships." SS&C is looking to do more work with liquid and retail products, and Sleightholme sees DST now being "able to bring a much broader array of capabilities" to traditional asset managers, too.

As reported by our sister publication, 401kWire, the DST name will continue, at least for now.

"We're still sort of going through that process, figuring out what the transitional brand strategy will look like," Sleightholme says.

Publicly traded SS&C (SSNC on the Nasdaq) now has nearly 25,000 employees, including the DST team. 

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