State Street continues to solidify its leadership in asset servicing by providing a cutting-edge platform for institutions and major operators in public and private markets across Asia Pacific. Winning multiple accolades at Asia Asset Management’s 30th Anniversary Best of the Best 2025 Awards, including Best Global Custodian in Asia-Pacific and Best Global Custodian in Asia Pacific (30 years), State Street has proven its position as a trusted partner for asset servicing in the region. Additionally, its recognition as Best Securities Financing Manager showcases the bank’s dominance in financing solutions, while the award for Best Regional Fintech Innovation in Asian Asset Management for State Street GlobalLink Digital (LINK) highlights the importance of innovation in driving its success.
With 11.5%1 of the world’s financial assets under its custody and administration, State Street is a trusted service provider and partner to institutional investors and a critical member of the global financial ecosystem.
“Global custody is at the core of what we do,” says Stefan Gmür, head of Asia Pacific and head of strategic business growth at State Street. “However, our clients increasingly rely on us for much more than custody. We provide an array of enterprise outsourcing services that are integral to their front, middle and back-office operations. This allows them to focus on delivering strong investment performance and unlocking growth, improving efficiencies, and capitalising on new market opportunities.”
State Street Alpha®, the bank’s front-to-back asset servicing platform harmonises data, technology, and services across the investment management lifecycle. Built on an open architecture, Alpha offers portfolio, risk and order management for public and private assets, providing institutional investors with access to analytics from a community of trusted providers and the ability to work from a single source of truth. State Street products and services, including securities finance and GlobalLink, are fully connected to the Alpha platform, creating a unified experience for clients.
As at Q4 2024, State Street Alpha was live with 25 mandates, serving some of the world’s largest and most complex asset managers and owners, including a growing number in Asia Pacific. “Data is at the heart of everything we do,” explains Gmür. “Alpha helps clients turn disparate data into actionable insights, which is a key differentiator in enabling them to generate better risk-adjusted returns, grow and retain AUM, and deliver novel, low-fee products to current and future generations of investors.”
Data is central to streamlined asset servicing. The Alpha Data Platform enables investment firms to leverage the breadth of internal and external data for deeper insights, complemented by Alpha Data Services, empowering clients with fit-for-purpose pricing, reference and benchmark data to meet their specific needs. State Street’s global team of data specialists provides follow-the-sun coverage to monitor and remediate data challenges in real time.
“Another driver for State Street Alpha is the growth of private markets,” says Gmür. “Asset owners and investment managers in Asia Pacific are managing increasingly complex portfolios that span public and private assets across multiple geographies. Traditional systems and processes are struggling to keep pace with the demands of these sophisticated investors, making it difficult to maintain a timely and accurate whole-of-fund view across their public and private assets.”
Private markets come with unique challenges – unstructured data, lack of standardisation and overreliance on spreadsheets and manual processes. As institutions grow their private assets, they need to analyse these assets just as effectively as their public holdings, explains Gmür.
State Street addresses this need by processing and organising vast amounts of disparate, unstructured data from sources like financial statements and spreadsheets. This process eliminates time-consuming manual work and provides clients with a unified, whole-of-fund view of their portfolios, spanning both public and private markets.
“This unified view is transformational,” Gmür adds. “With State Street Alpha, asset owners and asset managers can focus on executing their growth strategy without the drag and limitations of a segregated operating model. State Street is pushing the envelope of financial innovation to help its clients overcome traditional barriers to accessing timely and accurate portfolio-level data for private assets, streamlining their operations and decision-making.”
“As fund managers and asset owners across Asia Pacific expand into new geographies and asset classes, and navigate increasingly volatile macroeconomic conditions, State Street continues to support them as global partner with the scale, innovation, local market expertise and global network they need to succeed,” says Gmür.
For Asia’s asset managers, State Street offers not just technology and services, but a partnership for long-term success.
1Represents State Street AUC/A divided by Global Financial Assets, including Global Equity, Global Debt Securities and Global Broad Money (M3), as of December 31, 2023. Sources: SIFMA Markets Factbook, 2024; Organisation for Economic Co-Operation (OECD), World Bank. This represents State Street’s assets under custody and administration AUCA (USD$46.8T) as of September 30, 2024.
