BNY Mellon, the world’s largest custody bank, will combine its securities services platform, OMNI, with Amundi’s portfolio-management platform, known as ALTO, with a partnership to be announced Wednesday.

Their view is that the combination will help asset managers better steer portfolios. Everything being in one place will also make it easier to manage workflows so investors don’t have to toggle between multiple systems.

"An alliance like this takes things that you could do manually and makes it automatic and truly real-time and deeply integrated," Akash Shah, BNY’s head of strategy and global client management, said in an interview.

"A portfolio manager whose time is worth literally money doesn’t have to switch off to something else or copy and paste things to reconcile it and then still wonder if it’s 100 percent right or not. It’s all in one place."

It's the latest example of BNY Mellon plugging its back- and middle-office systems directly into a tool that investors already use. In 2019, it struck a similar deal with Blackrock Inc.'s Aladdin.

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The bank is employing an "open-architecture" strategy that gives investors the option to use whatever front-office provider they want. That's in contrast to competitor State Street Corp., which in 2018 announced plans to buy a data and analytics software of its own to create what’s known in the industry as a "front-to-back platform."

BNY's partnership with Amundi could make it easier for portfolio managers to manage liquidity and boost performance, according to Guillaume Lesage, Amundi's chief operating officer.

"By integrating the two platforms we bring new value for asset managers: real-time data and the capacity to have cash information real-time which is really something that asset managers need to have," Lesage said in an interview.

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