Bringing unit registry into the 21st Century

But at the end of the day, what it’s going to drive everyone to do is to build inefficient registry operations right across the market. There’s enough inefficient registry operations in fund manager shops without now having them in custodian shops. That’s what we’ve got to get around. If the members of ACSA can come to the view that, ‘Let’s all compete with each other on the things that we do well, and let’s try to buy services from someone on the things that we don’t do well’, that’s really very much a scale capability, like we do with sub-custody and other things around the world, then wouldn’t that be far more efficient? Chris Bain: It’s important to have on the table, that it is a common thing for unit registry to be a separately offered service in Europe and in the United States.

It is not in this country, and people still think, ‘I don’t really want to have a couple of relationships with different people when I’m doing my admin’. But I think the custodians, without putting any of them on the spot, are readily accepting that the unit registry pricing gets bundled up. And many of them, I would think, would have some trouble telling you precisely what those costs are. And one of the things that happens in a service company like Computershare, is we understand activity-based costing very well. And when we talk about offering a proposition we’ve got a very clear idea about what those costs ar. It costs X to do it manually; it costs you X divided by 15 to do it on a fully automated basis. But to automate you require standardisation. For standardisation, you have to have scale.

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Super funds and insurers confront escalating mental health claims crisis

Mental ill health claims across group and retail life insurance policies are expected to reach more than $4 billion this year, according to data from the Council of Australian Life Insurers and Conexus Financial – a trajectory that is unlikely to change. But the ways that superannuation funds and insurers are dealing with mental ill health are flawed, according to an Investment Magazine roundtable, in partnership with AIA Australia.

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