Praxis Partners has completed a white paper on the criteria for Future of Financial Reform-compliance. It is now conducting a process of interviews and demonstrations with GBST staff and product users to assess Composer’s readiness as the industry transitions through to the July 2013 – “drop-dead” date for compliance.

Composer is used in a wide range of financial services businesses, from traditional wrap platform providers to consumer-direct product providers.

Under the new regulations, platform providers will be required to provide upgraded FoFA functionality in their systems which may require more integration between front-end and back-end registry systems.

The white paper accompanying the GBST engagement notes that FoFA will require administration systems to deliver more detailed information on “fee-disclosure regimes and the granularity of information” provided to consumers.

The white paper says some key questions on the functionality of Composer are:

–       the level of fee-transaction granularity and whether that meets FoFA disclosure requirements,

–       how and where data regarding which clients have opted-in to fee charging can be recorded,

–       the reporting requirements which advisers will need to maintain their register of opt-in and opt-outout clients.

“The future for Composer now with its FoFA readiness is that we expect that clients using it will be able to introduce a level of efficiency into processing that didn’t exist previously,” said Nick Frolich, GBST executive manager, via email.

“We will see more transparency and efficiency in an almost true straight-through processing world.”