For the last two years we’ve sat with chief investment officers, chief operating officers and heads of technology at fourteen mid-size asset managers across Chile and Peru. Each one had recently migrated — or was actively planning to migrate — off a tier-one global portfolio management system. Aladdin, Geneva, SimCorp Dimension. The names that have anchored institutional buy-side technology for two decades.
What surprised us wasn’t that they were leaving. It was why.
The price story is wrong
The conventional narrative is that managers are leaving because the global PMS is too expensive. License fees, professional services, infrastructure. There’s some truth in that — annualised cost of ownership for an Aladdin deployment at a $1B AUM Chilean manager is genuinely punitive when measured against revenue. But cost is rarely the proximate cause of a migration. It’s the rationale on the executive memo. It’s not what tipped the room.
What tipped the room — in twelve of fourteen cases we mapped — was something operational.
What actually broke
The patterns repeat with surprising consistency. The breaking point was almost always one of three things:
- Regulatory adaptation. A new local regulatory regime — NCG 507 in Chile, the SBS regulatory updates in Peru, UAF reporting at scale — required changes that the global vendor either couldn’t ship in time or quoted at $400k+ for a configuration that was free in a regional alternative.
- Custodian connectivity. A migration to a new custodian (often BCI or BCP) exposed how brittle the global vendor’s connector layer was outside its core OECD list. Six months of “engineering work” to reconcile what should have been routine.
- Reporting that the front office can actually use. Managers were paying for a sophisticated multi-asset PMS and then exporting positions to Excel because the reporting layer didn’t speak Spanish, didn’t understand local fund vehicle types, didn’t allow non-engineers to ship a new client report.
“We were running an institutional PMS like a fancy data store. Everything we actually showed the front office or the regulator left the system anyway.” — CIO, Santiago AGF, $1.6B AUM
What they ran instead
In thirteen of fourteen cases, the destination was not another global vendor. It was a regional or specialist platform that had grown up alongside the LatAm market. BRITech is the most common name we heard. A handful of bespoke implementations sitting on open-source position-keeping engines. Two managers consolidated onto our own portfolio module.
The selection logic looked very similar across all of them:
- Native fluency with the local custodian and broker landscape
- Regulatory submissions generated by the platform, not exported to a separate tool
- A reporting layer the front office can extend without engineering
- A vendor relationship that responds to a Slack message in hours, not a ticket in days
What this means for the next 24 months
We think this shift is durable. The mid-size LatAm manager is the segment under most regulatory pressure (in absolute terms, not relative — the global tier deals with more, but they have the staffing to absorb it). They’re also the segment with the least tolerance for vendor friction. They have to be operationally lean.
What we’re watching for next:
- Bilateral integrations between regional platforms and the major custodians becoming a commodity. Not a $200k engagement.
- Open data layers — the kind we built into our own aggregator — letting managers swap PMS without re-doing the operations layer.
- AI-enabled regulatory tooling that the global vendors are slow to adopt because their roadmaps are owned by global product councils, not local operators.
The economic pressure is real. But the operational pressure is what’s actually moving the needle. Asset managers don’t want a different vendor — they want a vendor that actually understands the work.
Manuela Reyes leads Strategy engagements at finnerve. Reach her via the conversation form on her profile or write to hello@finnerve.com.