International Financial Data Services (IFDS), the international transfer agency joint venture between State Street Corporation and DST Systems, has reached agreement with Norwich Union Investment Funds (Norwich Union) for IFDS to provide a range of full service administration and call centre functions for the Norwich Union collective investments business.
During this year, Norwich Union has conducted a detailed and comprehensive review of the possible providers in the market and as a result has selected and now signed agreements with IFDS.
As a result of the agreement, all Norwich Union’s collective investment administration, customer and intermediary call centre functions will be transferred to IFDS at a date to be finalised in 2009. At that point the Norwich Union business will migrate onto IFDS’ FAST administration platform.
`’We continue to see collective investments as an important area of future profitable growth,`’ says Cathryn Riley, COO, Norwich Union Life. `’It is important that we have a low cost scalable platform to help us achieve this. IFDS are specialists in this particular area and they offer a robust model which will help to deliver economies of scale and cost efficiencies in our operation which will ultimately enable us to deliver further improvements in service.`’
`’We are delighted to have secured this deal with Norwich Union to provide our market leading administration and customer services to Norwich Union and its customers and eagerly anticipate the commencement of those services upon transfer of the functions in 2009,`’ says Simon Hudson-Lund, CEO, IFDS. `’At IFDS we are committed to providing our clients with the highest quality administration services and customer support. Norwich Union’s decision to outsource to IFDS is testimony that we are the leading provider of such services.`’