Calastone celebrates 10 years of automating managed fund trading in Australia and supporting its transition to a digital future
Calastone, the largest global funds network, is celebrating its tenth year in Australia, with full participation from across the industry, including fund managers, platforms and registries for automated order processing.
More than 95% of Australian wholesale managed fund flows are today automated by Calastone, representing trades into and out of over 2,000 funds traded within Australia. Each month, approximately A$23 billion, representing over half a million fund transactions, moves across the network, a staggering increase from the monthly A$5 billion that transacted across the network five years ago.
The industry’s fast and widespread adoption of Calastone makes Australia the fastest growing market for the UK based firm which expanded its presence to Australia 10 years ago with just nine clients. Calastone extended further to New Zealand in 2016, making the region’s funds management sector among the most automated in the world.
Over the last decade, Calastone has automated key functions that support the managed fund transaction lifecycle. Calastone’s services have enhanced efficiency and eliminated risks of manual errors industry-wide, freeing up resources to support growth, innovation and other priorities.
Its cornerstone solution for automated fund trade processing, Order Routing, was soon followed by Statement of Holdings and Statement of Transactions for automated reconciliation data collection, In-specie Transfers for individual or bulk movements of assets across platforms and custodians, and most recently, Wrap Reporting for faster and more usable adviser data.
Teresa Walker, Managing Director, Head of Australia and New Zealand at Calastone, commented, “We are very proud of the progress the industry has made in adopting automation across key functions and processes over the last ten years. When we started a decade ago, our mission was to eliminate friction across the managed funds trading chain. In Australia, like the UK, this started with a focus on eradicating manual processing of managed fund transactions, and the industry’s heavy reliance on the fax machine.
“Having connected a community that benefits exponentially from the ‘network effect’, we are now enabling new solutions and channels to be fit for the future.
“Our new DMI Fund Services solution presents immense opportunities in continuing our industry partnership and helping clients build new products, experiences and distribution channels for an accelerated digitalised future. We are extremely excited to be working at the global coalface of how to make tokenisation and the trading of tokenised assets a reality.
“We look forward to advancing the speed, scale and application of technology across the funds industry to enable more opportunity, certainty and visibility for all participants.”
