Ausfund and Super Member Investments have become the first known Australian clients for consultancy Thomas Murray’s custodian monitoring service.

The eligible rollover fund and the retail multimanager provider, which are owned by Industry Fund Services (IFS) and manage $1.3 billion between them, currently use National Custodian Services (NCS) as custodian. Thomas Murray’s monitoring service involves collecting statistical information on NCS’ service delivery to the institutions, and comparing it to proprietary global benchmarks. Unlike the full search service it provided to the Future Fund earlier this year, the monitoring service does not involve any site visits to the custodian. The general manager of IFS, David Haynes, said he was “;generally happy’ with NCS, but that “;as one of our two material outsourcing providers”;, it behooved the fund to review the relationship every three years. Thomas Murray’s Melbourne-based business manager in Australia, Karen Bignell, said the consultancy was in the midst of preparing its report on NCS for Ausfund/SMI. She said a Sydney-based super fund had also signed up for the monitoring service.