The pending arrival of the UCITS IV directive has inspired a new entrant in Australia’s highly competitive transition management marketplace, which believes the European legislation will spark a run of fund mergers around the globe.
BNP Paribas Securities Services has been presenting to Australian clients on last year’s tie-up with Convergex, an agency brokerage and trading technology provider which is part-owned by the Bank of New York, however has nothing to do with BNY Mellon’s own transition management service, helmed here by Keith Griffiths with implementation run by John Vernados.
The head of BNP PSS in Australia, Pierre Jond, said the joint venture allowed the post-trade administrator to participate in the flurry of fund mergers expected to follow the introduction of UCITS IV legislation, which is due to become effective across the 27 European Union states from July 2011.
UCITS IV will allow funds managers to slash the number of UCITS funds they must maintain across different countries, by allowing authorisation from a single European state. Managers will either be able to merge funds or create master-feeder structures, which Jond said would create work for transition managers from clients throughout the world.
Jond was speaking as BNP PSS announced that all of its Asia-Pacific clients had been migrated to the in-house global custody platform which replaces the previous outsourced relationship with Citi Global Transaction Services.
??Jond said approximately 30 clients, around 250 portfolios, over 15,000 securities and almost $30 billion in assets had been successfully migrated. Australian clients using global funds managers would be able to access information on them in a timely manner because of client windows in Philadelphia and London, while the non-client facing processing work is done from Chennai, India.
AMP Capital Investors, BNP PSS’ foundation and largest client, was the second firm migrated to the new platform. Jond was impressed that AMP CI head of operations, Peter Sipek, had travelled to the new Chennai site during his due diligence.
