Custodians asked to step up service

Super funds request more data

By Victoria Papandrea
Wed 03 Mar 2010

Custodians are stepping up the service they offer to their super fund clients, according to AustralianSuper.

Custodians are being asked to ramp up the service they offer to their superannuation fund clients who are increasingly requesting more data, AustralianSuper has said.

"The critical thing that we've been discussing with our custodian is that we want access to the data and we want it daily," AustralianSuper senior investment manager Peter Curtis said.

"They've been able to meet that requirement on all our listed portfolios across the overall pool of assets, and they've also been able to bring to the table a couple of very smart systems around the unlisted assets."

These systems have allowed AustralianSuper to capture the information on the individual assets within the platform, which the fund can then feed into an overall consolidated portfolio, Curtis said.

"So we can now look at retail businesses ... across the portfolio to understand our exposure to retail businesses everywhere," he said.

"So our custodian has helped us with providing the platforms to record the data and have also worked with us to get the data across to us so we could use it, whereas before it was all around reports."

While the fund did not want to start reducing its allocations to unlisted asset classes, Curtis said they did want to better understand how they could maximise the liquidity that is within the portfolio.

"I think the multi-manager set up doesn't really allow you to maximise all the liquidity and the sources of liquidity that are available across the whole portfolio," he said.

"So we went to one of our managers who we knew was sitting on a whole lot of cash within his fund and said, 'we know you've got some money there, we want our proportionate share out as a redemption'. So we got it out and it was able to go into our liquidity pool."

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