Like many registries in Australia, OneVue was looking for ways to streamline its asset transfers and leverage full STP (straight-through-processing). By reducing manual intervention, OneVue hoped to allocate more resources to added value activities, product innovation and customer services.
Nominee-to-nominee asset transfers – the movement of investor holdings between different fund platforms – are widely considered to be highly inefficient, with routine transactions often taking around two to three weeks to complete, sometimes more if there are complications with the manual transfer forms.
Not only does this create frictional costs for registries, asset managers, platforms, and custodians at a time when their margins are under growing pressure, but it can increase the likelihood of mistakes or errors creeping in which then introduced an element of risk into the whole process. Poor investor experience through delays and lack of information on transfer status play a part in eroding the client experience when transferring their assets from one platform to another.
Andrew Macciocca, COO of Managed Fund Admin at OneVue commented that, “It has been our continued goal and focus to standardise and scale the business. Automating transfers through Calastone has assisted us to decrease manual processing risk, increase our efficiency and provide greater service certainty. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the volume and benefit we’ve seen from day one of going live, and look forward to more platforms and custodians signing up so that volume continues to trend towards an increase in automated asset transfer volume.”
Identifying the solution
OneVue engaged with Calastone, who has played a pivotal role over the last few years in helping the industry automate its order routing and asset transfer processes.
In order to expedite asset transfers and help market participants rationalise their operating costs, Calastone launched its automated Australian Transfers solution, a faster, safer, trackable and electronic alternative to the existing resource-intensive process that many firms currently use.
Through enhanced automation and standardisation, Calastone can reduce the time it takes to complete an asset transfer from two to three weeks to less than one business day. After a seamless onboarding and initial testing period, OneVue went live with Calastone’s Transfers service in April 2019, and immediately noticed positive results.
The benefits of the new Transfers service
Automation has removed a lot of the heavy lifting synonymous with asset transfers, optimising validation and confirmation times, and helping to contain risk of manual errors.
Underpinning Calastone’s whole service is a best in class customer response team entrusted with assisting clients with their challenges and technology fixes.
OneVue also gets real-time visibility of the entire asset transfer life-cycle, enabling the registry to better safeguard investor interests. These transparency advantages have been warmly received by the clients.
Registries – including OneVue – have expressed satisfaction that they no longer need to devote inordinate amounts of time combing through physical correspondence and faxes when validating and confirming asset transfer requests.
In addition to benefiting from extensive operational efficiencies OneVue, who historically were responsible for overseeing manual activities, can now focus more on added value activities, product innovation and customer service.
Moving forward, Calastone intends to grow its service by sharing with the Australian market the potential benefits which automation can bring. For this solution to succeed, it is crucial that all impacted stakeholders (i.e. registries, sellers, buyers) are fully involved in this on-going dialogue.
Becoming the industry standard
By driving efficiency in asset transfers, Calastone helps augment customer experiences and boost overall competition in Australia’s fund platform market. As investors increasingly search for better returns and more cost-effective models across multiple platforms, automation of asset transfers is likely to assume a greater importance.
If the industry is serious about remaining competitive and retaining market share, then it needs to urgently change the way in which asset transfers are executed.
