@LeveragedThe secret sauce as you put it is the reason that the...

@Leveraged

The secret sauce as you put it is the reason that the MGPs and Linears of the world exist and decide to build their own software. They see a better way of doing or delivering something to the customer so they go ahead and build it themselves. I absolutely agree with that. Thats definitely something that you cannot outsource to someone else. But as I said earlier, they don't see value in re-inventing the wheel if they can get some software that does something well enough for them. Not only does it give them a massive head start to launch their product, it saves them money and resources up front from having to build it themselves. This is the point I was making about the state of open source software. If I am a developer and I'm building some software,  before I write a line of code to do something, I'd go and have a look around and see if there was an open source library that did the thing I was about to start coding. This is the thought process of MGP and Linear. They know they need to manage accounts, portfolios, securities, transactions etc so rather than build those pieces they buy something that does and build on top of it. This is why I believe that not owning 100% of your tech stack is not that big a deal. You just need to own your 'secret sauce' as you put it!

As far as I am aware, integration with SS&C for MGP and integration with IRESS for Linear has worked very well for the last 10 odd years that they've been doing it. If it hadn't worked for them I'd suggest they wouldn't be around and we wouldn't be talking about them, unless there is something you know about their tech stacks that we don't? You did say you had concerns with both of them, what specifically were those concerns?