The pandemic has brought about a sea change among asset owners, managers and servicers, who are seeking fresh ideas and approaches, said the regional head of Australian investment tech provider Milestone Group.

«What the pandemic has done is to change the preconceived views of the operating models of clients and institutional investors, and there's a real desire among them to improve that and make things more efficient,» Milestone Group's Marian Azer, told finews.asia in an interview.

«The pandemic really accelerated the need for people to be able to mobilize quickly their operations and do everything electronically,» the firm's Sydney-based managing director for Asia Pacific, who was appointed earlier this month, said.

APAC Strategy

Milestone recently announced a refreshed APAC strategy which puts additional weight and attention on the APAC markets, with Australia and New Zealand being a focus. «What we're doing with my role is to bring some of the things we've learned from the larger financial hubs back into the Asia Pacific market,» she said about her new role.

«There are a lot of exciting things happening in the region,» Azer said, citing the Asia Region Funds Passport – a multilateral framework to facilitate the cross-border marketing of managed funds across participating economies – and Singapore's Variable Capital Company (VCC) framework, launched in January, which gives fund managers greater flexibility in share issuance/redemption and the payment of dividends.

«Our platform is made for those kinds of structures. We make them simple for clients to administer,» Azer said. 

Centralized Solution

The firm's pControl solution allows clients to simplify some of the processes and activities they do along the investment chain, from front-office activities like asset allocation, to rebalancing and managing collateral pools and exposure management, to putting an order out into the market, and oversight. These activities are typically done on a number of platforms, spreadsheets and systems.

Headquartered in Sydney, Milestone has about 50 clients globally, including the likes of AMP, Suncorp, Aberdeen, BNY Mellon, Mercer, BNP Paribas, and Colonial First State, who collectively manage about $17 trillion in assets on its platform.