It’s inefficient. Warwick Angus: Computershare would say it’s easier to move from a complex market into a simple market, and therefore don’t think of Australia as an end destination to bring things in, but think of it as somewhere that can export. I don’t think that Asian markets will follow exactly the same trajectory that Australia does. Indeed they’ve already jumped a couple of steps. But the interaction, let me say to all of you around the room, the interaction between the fund manager, the platform, and what’s going on in the advisor’s front office, the financial advisor – we call them advisor desktop systems here; I’m talking about the XPLANs and Coins of the world – is going to be a very, very important part of how managed funds are administered, and you’re going to need a very particular kind of capability to deal with that. And we’re probably better set in this market to build that and export it than we are to do it the other way around. Chris Bain: Funds managers are price takers in this market, and something’s going to have to give somewhere.

If you’ve got someone saying, ‘I’ll give you $200 million; you’ll manage it for me for 25 basis points’, and you then find that the administration of those funds is costing you half of the cost of running it, you’re going to have to do something about it. So let me put this question on the table. Is the record keeping and associated functionality – and I’m talking about the workflow and the client service, et cetera – is it done efficiently in this market? I challenge anybody to say it is. Can anyone say it is? Mark Pratt: I’m certainly not arguing that point, Chris. I think my point around that is, can we all do it? Absolutely. Should we? Sure. But in the end, though, to get it to a scale which works, where will the money come from in a market where people don’t have as much, there are tighter focuses on liquidity and capital ratios, and much tighter views on risk and what it means.

Chris Bain: Risk and compliance? Mark Pratt: Yeah, all of those types of things. Look, we’ve got the functionality to do SwiftNet. But it’s absolutely irrelevant to me to do it until Macquarie Wrap, BT, MLC and all of the big wraps do it, because to turn it on and test it, it’s just uneconomic. And that’s the thing that I really wonder about. And I’m happy if there’s a way around it, then all good, because we’ll be knocking at the door if there’s a cheaper, more effective way to do it. Chris Bain: Change isn’t going to happen on its own. We can start to speculate on what Warwick talks about, the capacity to borrow scale from your existing businesses, e.g., share registry, to invest further in a way that allows you to expand your market beyond the Australian shore, out of the more complex into a less complex set of markets. We all know and understand each one of them’s different, but some of them are very large indeed. At its peak, James Wong, who’s ex-HSBC and runs our Hong Kong office, told us that some of the Chinese funds were signing up 500,000 new investors a day.