Chris Brideson: This industry doesn’t face the fact it’s inefficient, it’s not been acknowledged, and then it doesn’t go beyond that to say how can we improve our efficiency in innovative ways. I contrast it with the way the banking industry has taken on this task. Banks had a cost to income ratio of around 60 per cent in the mid-90s, and they’re now targeting towards 40 per cent. And this is because this has become a strategic imperative, to actually drive operating efficiency in that industry sector. Chris Bain: Absolutely. But one of the key things that happened there was, the cross-subsidisation from the home mortgage to the business account or whatever it was, had to stop, and let’s ask again about the structure of pricing per unit registry. This is an activitybased business, and it’s investment in technology that creates the straightthrough processing or versions of smart forms, the much more efficient collection and processing of information.

Those things have to happen before you can start to offer efficiency. This is where this conversation has to go. Bryan Gray: That’s a good point. One of the things that we’ve said in the last 12 months is managers, particularly larger established managers, have got pretty high fixed costs in an environment where their revenues have taken a dive. They need to try and convert as much of those costs to variable as they possibly can. Registry might not be a big part of what they do, but it’s still 15 people sitting in the office there, getting salaries. Managers have been knocking on our doors for the last six months or so, saying, ‘Can we revisit that outsourcing conversation we had two or three years ago?’ Sam Watkins: I grew up in the BT school of seeing how they run business.

I was then at Macquarie for quite some time before starting over at Credit Suisse. I’ve always been in the structured products space, and prior to moving into expanding our product set to take over-the-counter style product offerings to clients, a very large part of what I did was listed investment products. I see that platforms are going to become an even dominant source in Australia from my perspective as a customer. My clients are private banks, financial planners, stock brokers predominantly, and we need to buy space on the platform, or alternately we are paying them a level of commissions for something which is off platform. With the reviews that are happening, and all the outcomes of that, which will of course be most likely a reduction in any of those commissions paid, I expect what the outcome will be is that if it’s not on platform, we’re not dealing with the stock. So we have two choices available to us.