UK-based fund transaction automation service, Calastone, has secured its second major NZ platform client with the ASB-owned Aegis going live last week.
With the addition of Aegis, which joins major rival FNZ on the client list, Calastone has captured the majority of the NZ investment platform business.
Collectively, FNZ and Aegis have more than $20 billion in funds under administration, split fairly evenly between the two.
Tony Nejasmic, Calastone Australia and New Zealand head of business development, said while it was “pleasing” to have signed on Aegis and FNZ in such short order, the group was also in talks with other local platform providers including NZX Wealth Technologies (formerly known as Apteryx) and Rabobank.
“In Australia Calastone has about 85 per cent of the platform market,” Nejasmic said.
As well as New Zealand’s two largest investment platforms, Calastone counts Public Trust and fund administrator, MMC, as clients for its order routing solution.
Calastone’s order routing service automates the flow of information between investment platforms, funds and administrators, potentially saving time, reducing errors and freeing staff up for more “meaningful tasks”, Nejasmic said.
Nejasmic said the NZ fund market was ripe for further automation with many back office services still carried out manually.
“We’ve entered New Zealand with our order routing service,” he said. “But we also have a number of adjacent products that we’re talking to New Zealand clients about.”
For instance, Nejasmic said the Calastone reporting service, which automates activities such as reconciliation between platform and funds and client distribution statements, could also find support in New Zealand.
“We’ve purposefully built the Calastone Reporting solution to fit with local market specifications such as tax reporting specifications,” he said in a statement.
Nejasmic said automating fund back office functions can lift efficiency, lower business risks (with lower error rates etc), and increase the “visibility for all parties” via Calastone’s web portal that tracks order flows across the system.
He said both Aegis and FNZ would roll out the Calastone order routing service across their entire platforms after an initial test period.
“Both of them have started out with just a few transactions to make sure the pipes work,” Nejasmic said. “But they’ll ramp it up over the next couple of months.”
Founded in the UK, Calastone claims over 1,000 clients in 29 jurisdictions including New Zealand.
In Australia, the group “represents around 85 per cent of the institutional platforms and approximately 65 per cent of fund managers”, according to a Calastone release.