Background
MainstreamBPO group is an ASX listed provider of specialist fund administration solutions for the financial services industry. With a global presence, Mainstream administer nearly 450 funds, and have over AU$95bn in funds under administration. Having recently celebrated their 10thanniversary, their current focus is on organic growth, acquisition of complementary businesses, and the broadening of their service offering through investment in new technology.
Their mission to improve efficiency while lowering costs helped drive them to automate a number of areas that were expensive and time consuming for themselves and their clients.
The challenge
Prior to the introduction of Calastone into the Australian market five years ago, managed fund transactions were predominantly processed manually. This presented a large amount of risk, and significantly reduced the speed of transaction processing. Over the past five years, the Calastone network and the industry have continued to grow and so too has the need and desire to automate processes. MainstreamBPO identified two key processes that were causing inefficiency and increasing risk.
In MainstreamBPO’s unit registry area, email instructions and faxes from platforms presented a number of issues, such as the risk of potential errors when re-keying data, while also being very time consuming and ultimately costly to process.
In addition, the speed in which end investors were able to receive consolidated holding, transaction and tax reporting was not as fast as they would have liked. Platform providers were receiving these statements in a variety of different formats through different connectivity methods which was both expensive and time consuming.
Selecting Calastone: Calastone Order Routing & Calastone Reporting
In order to address these issues, MainstreamBPO decided to partner with Calastone by adopting both Calastone Order Routing and Calastone Reporting solutions.
In summary, Calastone Order Routing automates the trade flow between all parties in the managed funds industry, providing electronic message translation and distribution.
Calastone Reporting takes multiple files that are in different formats (such as holding, transaction and tax reports) and seamlessly converts them into a single format. This format can then be used by distributors to quickly and efficiently reconcile their holdings and pass through to the underlying investors.
Onboarding and key benefits
The onboarding process was orderly, executed to plan and was overall a seamless integration. Commenting on the implementation of both solutions, Alicia Gill, Marketing Manager at MainstreamBPO said: ‘The feedback from all the team at MainstreamBPO has been really positive. We all worked well together, and we found that Calastone was very accommodating and tailored very well to our specifications – overall the approach was flexible and agile, so the implementation went very smoothly.’
MainstreamBPO’s clients have seen a number of immediate benefits from the use of Calastone Reporting. Alicia commented: ’The provision of fast and accurate holding and transaction reports to custodians, platforms and underlying investors is a key benefit experienced by our Calastone enabled clients.
Furthermore, since joining Calastone the average time taken to confirm a fund transaction has reduced significantly, and the quality of our transaction services has improved for those clients. Calastone has also allowed MainstreamBPO to provide better transparency and identify any potential discrepancies or loss events much earlier in the transaction lifecycle’.
MainstreamBPO have also directly benefited themselves – the provision of tax statements in a unified format has enabled them to streamline their unit registry service by improving efficiency and reducing the risk and cost associated with re-keying data.
Through Calastone Order Routing, MainstreamBPO has successfully streamlined the processing of orders – MainstreamBPO added: ‘[Order Routing] has eliminated the need for our unit registry administrators to manually scan thousands of faxes, so that means that we are improving our efficiency, but it also means, for the client, that the average time to confirm a transaction is reduced and the overall quality of the transaction is improved.’
The power of automation
Now with over 80% of all transactions being automated via Calastone, MainstreamBPO has successfully reduced risk, lowered cost and significantly increased efficiency for themselves and their clients.
By removing manual processes, MainstreamBPO have now successfully streamlined two key areas of their business that were causing significant issues for themselves and their clients.
MainstreamBPO and Calastone continue to partner in a drive to increase automation.
