How they interact with us, how they talk to us, the messages they get from us, are crucial in a retail sense. We felt that there would always be a risk if we fragmented that service proposition, and we never really wanted to give away the people answering the phone. And I’m not certain that we, as a fund manager with a larger retail presence, ever will want to do that. To me that only introduces an additional operational client service risk, that we couldn’t find a value proposition in the market that made that worth our while. Michael Bailey: Any industry utility in unit registry would assume funds managers are always going to want to have that phone conversation with their investors, right? Jim Savage: I don’t think so. I come from a very boutique perspective. The important thing is your asset licencing requirements become more and more complex the more you do in-house. If you want to do unit pricing in-house, you’ve got to upgrade your ASIC licence.

You want to then become a responsible entity, you’ve got to upgrade your licence again, and you’ve got to keep a lot of money on the balance sheet. Bryan Gray: The big issue, and the reason that I’ve been an advocate over many years for a unit registry utility, is that there’s only a couple of ways you can get scale in this. One is you bundle it with all sorts of other things that you do as a custodian. I don’t think any custodians are sitting back there saying, ‘Hey, this is a real money-spinner, let’s get into the registry business because we can all make money out of it’. You can only offer it if you’re charging somewhere else – if you’re making money on custody or you’re making money on foreign exchange or other services that you can then bundle together to make the thing work. The other way you can do it is you can get scale out of doing it, like they’ve done in the US. You can get scale out of actually making it work as a stand-alone business, like the Boston Financial Data Services of this world, that have brought the scale to actually make it a viable business to operate on its own.

They’ve leveraged off their traditional share registry backgrounds, to say, ‘Well, hey, this makes a whole lot of sense; we’re doing it for companies, why don’t we now start doing it for unit trusts as well.’ Tim Worner: In Australia you’ve got four broad categories: you’ve got old retail, which is like the Perpetuals and BTs and that stuff; you’ve got institutional, which can be direct to institutional, to platforms, which is really B2B; you’ve got new retail, which is managers trying to connect up to the selfmanaged supermarket; and then you’ve got stuff like structured And you know what it’s like, people come through the door with ‘I got 2000 accounts, I’ve got a bit of that, a bit of that, a bit of this.’ And it’s very hard. Kay Sprague: We have a similar situation. Globally we’ve got very large systems, either in the US or in Europe. They support very large fund managers, they distribute products throughout Asia.