I made my way to nearby Jersey City, N.J., yesterday to visit with the folks at Pershing LLC.
After a few minutes' ride on the PATH train from New York beneath the Hudson River, there I was, sitting in a big conference room with many of the custodian's key senior technology executives.
There were co-chief information officers Ram Nagappan and Lucille Mayer as well as Steve Dunlap, who is president of the firm's managed investments arm and Michelle Gutierrez, director of customer engagement and marketing for technology products and services.
Patrick Yip, director of advisory market technology strategy and Marc Butler, managing director at Pershing affiliate company Albridge were there too.
Pershing's overall annual technology budget this year is in the neighborhood of $400 million, a decent chunk of parent firm BNY Mellon's overall $2 billion in technology outlay.
Perhaps that seems like a lot but to add a bit of perspective as of the end of December, BNY Mellon reported having $26.2 trillion in assets under custody and/or administration and $1.4 trillion in assets under management.
In the meeting, we discussed a wide range of topics, many of which I will probably dig into in future stories for the paper.
Mulling it all over, I thought I would hit a few highlights to get readers thinking prior to Pershing's annual Insite conference next month.
Perhaps the thing with the most sex appeal was the discussion of Pershing's next generation mobile platform.
It must be said that the firm was the first of the major custodians to roll out mobile applications for their advisers three years ago, not long after the introduction of Apple Inc.'s now ubiquitous iPad.
That said, more than one adviser has told me in the last year or so that it really is in need of a refresh.
And that is exactly what the Pershing folks said is coming.
“It is going to be available in all platforms,” said Mr. Nagappan.
And that includes a Microsoft Windows 8 version for the company's SurfacePro device, despite its low rate of adoption.
Mr. Nagappan grew excited as he described how little all of the computing power most of us leverage from our mobile devices, and explained how the new generation would represent a hybrid approach.
“Each of us is holding [the equivalent processing power] of a 1985 Cray [mainframe] computer in our hand but all we are using it right now is to run the web browser,” he said.
UPDATE AND CORRECTION: In the original story I wrote that the next generation of Pershing's mobile platform will be HTML5-based, meaning it will run on the web browser of whatever device you are using. That was incorrect.
"It will be an app that will be in the [Apple] App Store and we also plan to white label and brand it for broker-dealers and RIAs. Think of this as a specialized browser app that we built for iOS that can do native function and also bring in components built in HTML5 through a web API [application programming interface]." wrote Mr. Nagappan in a follow-up e-mail to correct me.
(And again, based on our conversation during our in-person meeting the app will eventually be available for all the major mobile platforms including Apple iOS, Android, Microsoft Windows 8 and mobile as well as Blackberry).
“We are taking this approach because we want to leverage our investment in HTML and bring the best of both worlds together,” Mr. Nagappan said, referring both to the latest in web technology and being able to tap Pershing's vast array of back-end systems and data.
The design should make many of Pershing's 1,500 broker-dealer clients happy because of the ease with which it can be deployed.
Pershing is using the mobile device management platform from Good Technology, a leader in the space that is used by more than 4,000 enterprise customers around the world.
“We are wrapping Good Technology around it, placing the entire app inside the container,” he said, thus allowing clients a great deal of flexibility in how the application will be managed, on what devices in particular and which parts of the Pershing platform advisers or other professionals will have access to.
