Opening up early access to super for housing would have a negative effect on the balances of even those members that don’t dig into their savings, with funds forced to adopt more conservative investment strategies and hold more liquid assets.
The circa $88 billion industry fund for workers in health and community services reckons that alleviating the affordable housing crisis will boost its other investments by easing the cost of living and inflation.
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.
