The fund administration market has boomed in the last decade, sprouting a fresh landscape of new providers, fund structures and services. Those at the top of the pile have taken full advantage of the purple patch, spawning a small clique of providers each now overseeing over $1 trillion worth of assets. Chris Lemmon looks at the reasons behind their success and the future grounds for growth.

What was once a cottage industry is now a very large one awash with institutional money, and with this comes new responsibilities and challenges as private markets continue to ascend to new heights.

Financial services have long played an important role in the Cypriot economy. Can funds and fund services sectors take advantage of local talent to grow beyond the demographic constraints of the local market?

For much of their existence, triparty structures have been used primarily to support the financing needs of the sell-side. With a growing need for buy-side firms to manage collateral in new regulatory frameworks, what developments do triparty agents anticipate?

Regulators have announced proposed amendments to Form PF in order to understand large hedge funds’ investment exposures, open positions and borrowing and financing arrangements with counterparties.

In an increasingly complex, competitive and evolving space, superannuation funds face decisions and realities in the coming years that will define their future. Tied to their fates are the custodians they partner with, which will have to work more closely with their clients than ever before in a market where only the best will survive.

Institutional investors are diving deeper into the world of carbon offsets, and asset managers and asset servicers have opportunities to deliver new offerings to clients, ranging from data analysis on the impact of various offsets to accounting and reporting on these offsets.

Mutual funds aren’t new and neither are ETFs, but the conversion from one to the other is a recent phenomenon gaining momentum among asset managers.

When people speak about transfer agency, they often use words like ‘overlooked’ and ‘underrated’, and for a long time they wouldn’t have been far off the mark. However, those close to market now paint a different picture. Emerging technologies, value-added services and a more global proposition have given the industry a new buzz and a potentially new look for the future.

The global ETF market has seen extraordinary growth since its inception almost 30 years ago, with the range of ETF products growing increasingly diverse and complex. In Europe, a high rate of settlement failures and general inefficiency in the market has meant there has been a drive to bring more ETF trades through central clearing, providing greater risk mitigation and operational efficiency. But is enough being done to facilitate that switch?

As large investors look to obtain cost savings and operational efficiencies – yet at the same time – maximise performance returns amid the challenging macroeconomic environment, a handful of extremely large institutions are giving serious thought to insourcing private asset investment activities.

The obscure functionality developed by T2S could potentially help settlement efficiency rates improve by up to 5%, but it needs to be adopted by all players in the custody chain to work effectively.

The sale of Rosbank adds Russia to a growing list of country exits for Societe Generale Securities Services, with industry experts believing the custodian is now at a critical juncture for a business that requires scale, investment and a strategic growth focus.

Reports say a handful of major banks are mulling over the idea of accepting synthetic crypto assets as collateral in exchange for providing cash loans to institutional clients. Charles Gubert examines whether using crypto-assets as collateral is the future of banking or a disaster in the making.

An industry traditionally known for being quite opaque, hedge funds and private equity firms have become increasingly transparent with their investors and regulators since the financial crisis. As competition for client mandates intensified and regulators clamped down on shadow banking activities, alternative asset managers had little option other than to be more open about their strategies and operations. While the industry has made huge progress in terms of its overall transparency, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) argues more work is still needed.