A triparty made up of Point Nine Financial Technologies, Prime Administration and the IDS Group, has joined together to form Centro Fund Services, an independent middle office service provider to the South African investment manager market.
The deal marks the first time web-based technologies have been used to deliver enterprise service solutions to the South African fund management market.
Centro Fund Services offers day-to-day portfolio administration covering trade capture, counterparty trade reconciliations, settlements, and reconciliations with other third parties such as fund administrators, prime brokers and custodians.
It allows fund managers and their investors to maintain oversight of the middle office function by providing real-time access to a wide range of activities ? including transactions, positions, shadow NaV and counterparty risk ? through Point Nine’s proprietary web-delivered Circle platform.
“By harnessing the use of a proven international system, the experience of a local settlement team and the strength of the IDS marketing reach we will be able to provide a cost effective and efficient solution for investment managers”, said Ian Hamilton, CEO of IDS Group.
“Medium sized fund managers are willing to use third party service providers so they can concentrate on the investment decision making".
“The beauty of Circle, being proprietary technology, is that it is counterparty agnostic. This enables Circle to provide a single set of books and records for transactions processed through multiple brokers, custodians and administrators“, added Graeme Rate, founder and CEO of Prime Administration.
Circle’s web-delivered technology solutions not only provide the robustness to a fund manager’s operational infrastructure, but also offer the benefits of a web-delivered platform. “We were able to implement Circle at Centro quite literally with the flick of a switch.
Non-web technologies would have required teams of technology consultants in Cape Town for several months and the fact that the conversion to Circle could be delivered via the web made it a more competitive and efficient solution.” said Pavlos Christoforou, partner in charge of technology at Point Nine.
