Speaking to InvestorDaily, Hyperion managing director Tim Samway said that by joining the Calastone network, customers will benefit from improved automated inflow from platforms and custodians.
“It is just the ability to keep our finger on the pulse of flows and provide customer service,” Mr Samway said.
“If somebody actually puts a lot of money into our account, we want to know about it immediately, and to me that is customer service.”
Hyperion marks the 81st Australian client for Calastone, which said it has now been joined by more than 40 per cent of the Australian managed-fund network.
Mr Samway said that the managed-fund industry in Australia is moving to automation for improved efficiency.
“This style of automation is, in my mind, really about error reduction,” Mr Samway said.
“There are an awful lot of processes that are currently used that are just manual – a lot of faxing and re-transcribing data – so this just reduces the opportunity for error.
“The second thing is [Calastone] pays an efficiency dividend in that, without a whole lot of intervention points, there is an increase in the speed to the market.”
Calastone went live in Australia in November 2011 and the company’s Australian managing director Shannon Sweeney told InvestorDaily the strong take up of the service is due to its unique placement in the domestic market.
She said that automation in Australia has often failed as a result of the market housing too many electronic formats that were incompatible.
In many cases where automated proposal came to the market in Australia they were predominately restricted by two things: one you had to use a certain format and two you often had to installed hardware or software associated with the communication,” Ms Sweeney said.
“Where Calastone is different is that we can take anything electronic, so different formats and different legacy systems in the Australian market, and we translate to whatever the receiving party’s format is required.”
“There is no hardware required so it lowers that cost barrier to entry in terms of automation.”
