In what it’s claiming is an Australian first, Milestone Group’s pControl system will be able to fully automate corporate actions processing, once an installation with a major funds manager is complete in the third quarter of 2006.
Milestone has already won a flurry of clients recently because of pControl’s unit pricing automation capabilities, the latest being boutique backoffice specialist White Outsourcing. Milestone chief executive, Grant Hodge, said most Australian funds managers still had high levels of manual intervention in their corporate actions and unit pricing functions, but this situation was under pressure thanks to greater regulatory focus on reporting accuracy, and moves to tighten ‘materiality’ limits on unit pricing errors. Hodge said pControl would be able to automate the receipt, diarisation and stakeholder notification of corporate action events, where currently they were handled by a combination of manual calendars and workflow tools like Outlook systems. The first White Outsourcing client to go live with unit pricing automation through pControl will be Smallco Investment Fund, which from July 1 will implement daily pricing through the system. Several other managers had enquired whether White Outsourcing could provide straight through processing of daily unit pricing, according to divisional director Peter Roberts, who said pControl was an “investment in our company’s future”. Although pControl works across the gamut of fund processing and accounting functions, Roberts said White would be sticking with Garradin as its backoffice system, and Portfolio Server’s Trust Architect system for unit registry.
Mega fund AustralianSuper said it is still feeling the pain from its very public loss in US software company Pluralsight, and even with $341 billion of assets under management, a $1.1 billion write-down is still too big a chunk of money to let go easily. But at the Fiduciary Investors Symposium, the fund’s senior private equity portfolio manager Robert Schnittger, said the most important thing now is to learn the lesson and “not lose money the same way twice”.
Darcy SongNovember 11, 2024