At a recent specialist fund administration roundtable, panellists discussed how much firms have been able to consolidate their systems and providers, or whether specialists are still used for each asset class.
Christian Heinen, managing director, IQ-EQ Luxembourg – The trend will be towards having a variety of specialised systems, with scale playing an important role. So, a company can continue to invest and then scale up. A critical point is how you can evolve those systems by connecting them. It is about creating a layer where you can connect the dots and let different data sets speak to one another. This you can make available to the client, securely, as Data as a Service, for example.
Noel Fessey, CEO, European Fund Administration – If you have a variety of systems, you would certainly want to create a degree of coherence in the data layer that you then present to your client. But the phrase that I use is, ‘not to commit the sin of putting a saddle on a cow’; in other words, choose the appropriate tool for the purpose at hand. So, don’t try to force the client’s service model into an operating model based on your vision on PowerPoint of how things should work. Make the right choice, and if your business is not large enough to support multiple engines, you’ll have to make the compromises necessary and try to support your clients on the engines available.
Fabrice Mas, head of PERA, Luxembourg, MUFG Investor Services – It depends on the organisation and how you built things from the beginning. I don’t think that one platform can literally do everything, so it’s about using a variety and adapting them to your clients’ needs. Our main focus has been to automate our processes by connecting dedicated internal tools with our core fund administration systems. This covers a broad range of tasks like complex waterfall calculations, flexible and real-time reporting of granular data at the level of the portfolio to assets/fund managers and investors, payments and currency overlay.
Jervis Smith, country managing director, Luxembourg, Vistra – It’s good that we’ve got specialised systems for the different asset classes and for the different client groups, and it’ll be interesting to see whether the asset owners start to pressurise the fund administrators to provide performance-measurement tools. For us, the entity management system is key to bring the information relating to each client group together and tee up automation.
Read the full roundtable here: Specialist fund admin roundtable: Technology and the human touch
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