Witad Awards 2024: Technology innovator of the year (vendor)—Christy Bremner, SS&C Technologies

What is your position within your firm?
Christy Bremner: I run the Institutional & Investment Management (I&IM) division of SS&C that provides software and services to global investment managers.

How long have you been in the financial services industry?
Bremner: I’ve worked in the industry for 33 years.

How did you get into the industry? Was it a conscious decision or did you “fall” into it?
Bremner: After college, I took a year off before law school. I had moved to Colorado and was working as a trader at a bank trust and eventually never went to law school. I did that for a couple of years and then headed back to Boston and landed my next job based on my experience as a trader.

What does your day-to-day role entail?
Bremner: My day-to-day is about spending time with various parts of the organization to ensure we are progressing and engaging with clients and prospects and delivering on our short- and long-term strategies. Any given day can involve meetings with our sales teams or account managers with and without clients and prospects, reviews of product implementations, meeting with our R&D teams on product roadmaps and initiatives and working cross-company on growth initiatives.

What single project/piece of work are you most proud of during your career in the industry to date?
Bremner: Most recently, I’m proud of the work we have done to bring SS&C Aloha to market. We released it about two years ago and we now have over 60 clients. It’s a front-to-back investment operations platform that addresses challenges that organizations face like data movement between stand-alone systems, inefficient and manual processes, and complex, dissident user interfaces. It’s cloud first and we have used innovative technologies to really drive efficiencies in the investment operations workflows.

What are you currently working on and what makes it significant in the context of your position?
Bremner: I remain focused on SS&C Aloha. It’s incredibly significant for our business growth. I am also working with two other businesses, one in the property management space and the other in the banking space, to bring new transformative solutions to market over the next couple of years.

To what extent were you helped during your career by a mentor/role model within the business?
Bremner: I have had a few mentors. The woman who hired me into my second position was a significant mentor and helped me develop in my early years. Later, I had a mentor who helped me make a significant step jump in my career, from running a business function to a whole business, then I had a professional coach for a year.

In hindsight, these mentors were at different times and points in my career and had a significant impact on my development and success at particular points in my journey.

I think it has to do with understanding outcomes and what you can do to influence them. Many people accept certain situations and circumstances as if they can’t be impacted. I look at just about everything with a view that you can do something to impact the outcome, in fact my team will probably tell you that I am relentless on this. I think it’s been key for me in making progress and having successes

To what extent does your firm have a formalized framework that seeks to identify and promote talented women and ensure they have every opportunity to realize their ambitions and contribute to the business?
Bremner: SS&C has a Learning & Development team that runs year-long leadership and development programs of both online and virtual classes to help women and men with their professional goals and effectiveness. Senior managers identify and recommend the people for these programs. Throughout the business, we have mentoring programs that link women rising to more experienced women leaders.

What is the most valuable lesson you’ve learned so far during your career?
Bremner: I think it has to do with understanding outcomes and what you can do to influence them. Many people accept certain situations and circumstances as if they can’t be impacted. I look at just about everything with a view that you can do something to impact the outcome; in fact, my team will probably tell you that I am relentless on this. I think it’s been key for me in making progress and having successes.

What would you advise women just entering the industry?   
Bremner: Focus on building experience and becoming valuable because of what you can contribute.

What does this award mean to you?
Bremner: I’d really like to thank WatersTechnology for this year’s technology innovator of the year award. The success my team and I have had with Aloha is a result of not just my efforts but the very talented team who have worked so hard and smart on bringing the product to market. I think it’s important that WatersTechnology recognizes the specific efforts of women in data and technology who might otherwise not be recognized.