This year’s top 10 stories included a peek into AustralianSuper’s international equities build out in London, AMP’s move to slash employee benefits, and plenty of hard-hitting analysis of the issues that matter in institutional investment. But the real story is how readers helped shape all of that coverage.
Orbis’ Stuart Place is riding from Melbourne to the Moon and Back to fund a treatment for the “monster of a disease” that his youngest son was born with. The investment industry is rallying behind him.
Front-to-back services boost global custody
Front-to-back services and market activity have helped the big global asset servicing companies to record levels of assets under custody and administration in the March quarter, despite falling interest income.
State Street emphasised the success of its front-to-back offering, which it calls ‘State Street Alpha’, with the quarterly Wall Street earnings statement (April 16) coinciding with the announcement of its new relationship with global manager Invesco to include the integrated service.
State Street also announced this month that it had bolstered its front-office services through a “strategic engagement” with S&P Global Trucost, the provider of climate data and analytics. This is being added to the custodian’s ESG risk analytics under an open-architecture system.
J.P. Morgan, meanwhile, announced that it had added Franklin Templeton Australia to its new ‘InvestOne’ fund accounting platform, following going live with Fidelity International last year. So far, nine J.P. Morgan clients have taken up the service.
As previously reported, (Investor Strategy News, Feb 21) each of the major custodians has earmarked middle-and-front-office services as the main area of business growth in the institutional space over the next few years.
Northern Trust this February added an alliance with IHS Markit for its ‘thinkFolio’ order management system for middle-office services followed by an equity investment in Equity Data Science for cloud-based analytics for the Northern Trust ‘Whole Office’ front-to-back offering.
In its earnings statement (see separate report this edition), State Street’s Ron O’Hanley, the chairman and chief executive, said that about one-third of new asset servicing business yet to be installed at the quarter’s end could be attributed to “Alpha deals”. He said 13 new Alpha clients had been signed since the system’s inception, three of them in the March quarter.
The new business in the quarter reflected larger wins across all regions, State Street said, with “continued support from the Alpha value proposition”. State Street was also nearing completion of a program to provide enhanced coverage to the top 350 clients and was progressing key deals across client segments and regions.
