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Connect integrations: how trustees eliminate duplicated investment admin

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Why an API and ecosystem partnerships with leading admin systems matter more than any single feature inside the trust admin platform

4 mins
Topics
Connect & Data Connect Monitor
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Author
tom-wiseman

Tom Wiseman

CEO

Tom is the Chief Executive Officer of Enhance Group overseeing our multi-jurisdictional Monitor and Select solutions from our Jersey headquarters.

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The duplication of investment administration across multiple systems is one of the great hidden inefficiencies of the fiduciary industry. The same holdings data is touched in Connect, re-keyed in the trust admin system, exported to the accounting platform and copied into the management information pack. Each touch adds cost, error and audit risk. Connect’s integration layer removes the duplication. This article explains how Connect connects to the systems trustees already use, the five categories of data that travel across the integration, and the ecosystem partnerships that make it work out of the box.

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Why duplicated investment admin is the industry’s tax on inefficiency

Trust companies have invested heavily over the past two decades in trust administration platforms, systems that manage the entity, structure, beneficiary, document and accounting data the trust company is responsible for. Those platforms are good at what they do. They are not, and were never intended to be, investment governance and monitoring platforms. Investment data lives elsewhere: in custodian portals, in manager reports, in performance tools, in spreadsheets. The result is duplicated data across systems, with the trust company finance and operations teams carrying the cost of keeping everything in sync.

The cost is not just operational. Every re-keying is a potential error. Every reconciliation is potential audit exposure. Every system silo means trustees making investment decisions from one set of data while the accounting team closes the period using another. Connect integrations solve this at source: the investment data lives in Connect, where it is verified and standardised, and flows automatically into the systems trustees already use for the rest of trust administration.

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The three layers of Connect integration

01 Ecosystem

Partnerships with leading trust admin systems

Connect maintains direct ecosystem partnerships with leading trust administration and accounting platforms, currently including PlainSail, Quantios, Vega Technology, CoreFocusX and Optifi. Each partnership delivers a tested, supported, off-the-shelf integration that trust companies on those platforms can switch on without bespoke development. The data flows from Connect into the partner platform on a defined schedule, in a defined format, with defined mappings to the partner’s data model. Enhance maintains the integration end-to-end, including upgrades when either side releases a new version. The trust company benefits from the partnership without paying for the build and without owning the maintenance burden.

02 API

Custom integrations for proprietary or in-house systems

Beyond the ecosystem partnerships, Connect offers a fully documented API for trust companies that operate proprietary in-house systems or platforms outside the ecosystem partner set. The API is resource-oriented and follows the JSON:API specification, with token-based authentication and a sandbox environment for testing before moving to production. Data is modelled to reflect the real-world relationships between portfolios, investment managers, reviews and transactions, so trust company developers can navigate the data set naturally rather than reassembling it from flat files. For trust companies without internal API engineering capacity, Enhance maintains a network of independent Implementation Partners, technical consultants who know Connect and can build the custom integration on the trust company’s behalf.

03 Data

Five categories available across the integration layer

Five categories of Connect data are available across both ecosystem and API integration paths. Holdings valuations populate target client reporting with security-level and aggregate portfolio values. Itemised transactions are mapped to a universal double-entry bookkeeping standard, ready to drop into any accounting ledger (see Investment bookkeeping). Action points generated by Enhance can be managed inside the trust company’s own workflow system rather than copied across from Connect, removing duplicate task lists. Review reports are produced quarterly in PDF and land automatically in target document management systems on a defined schedule. Portfolio properties, covering everything from reference codes to performance and risk statistics, can be exposed for any operational purpose the trust company’s downstream systems require. Five categories, one infrastructure, and the integration layer included in the standard Monitor fee.

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How the integration is implemented in practice

Connect integrations are overseen by Enhance’s Engineering team in collaboration with the trust company’s IT and operations leads. For ecosystem partner platforms, the implementation typically involves switching on the standard integration, configuring the partner-side mappings, and running a parallel period to confirm the data is flowing as expected. For API integrations, the same Engineering team works alongside the trust company’s developers, or alongside one of Enhance’s independent Implementation Partners where the trust company prefers to outsource the build. Sandbox access is provided for testing before production release, and the integration is maintained end-to-end on the same fee basis as the rest of the Monitor service.

The implementation is delivered without additional charge as part of the Monitor engagement. Like the bookkeeping data and the Connect platform itself (see The Connect platform), the integration layer is included in the standard portfolio and client review fees. The only additional charges that may apply are for sustained, large-volume API consumption beyond the standard service envelope, and these are agreed up front so the trust company has full visibility on the total cost of ownership before any commitment is made.

What’s available across the integration layer

The five data categories below are available across both ecosystem partner integrations and the Connect API. Each category serves a specific operational purpose inside the trust company’s broader workflow.

Data category What it enables
Holdings valuations Security-level and aggregate portfolio values populate target client reporting.
Itemised transactions Double-entry transaction data populates accounting ledgers.
Action points Managed inside target workflow tools rather than only inside Connect.
Review reports Auto-saved to target document management systems on production.
Portfolio properties Reference codes, stats and metadata populate trust admin records.

The bottom line

Connect integrations turn the duplication of investment administration from a permanent industry tax into a solvable problem. Ecosystem partnerships cover the trust industry’s most-used admin platforms; the Connect API covers everything else. The five categories of integrated data (valuations, transactions, action points, review reports and portfolio properties) are enough to remove most of the manual re-keying that consumes your trust company’s time today. All included in the standard Monitor fee plus a single API fee per trust company.

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