Northern Trust has made a series of enhancements to its transfer agency product offering supporting asset managers in the UK, as well as offshore in Ireland, Luxembourg and the Channel Islands.
The enhancements are part of Northern Trust’s aim to increase automation and provide increased straight-through processing for clients, resulting in improved risk management, it says.
Designed specifically for Northern Trust’s offshore clients, the fee rebate module provides an automated and scalable solution to support the calculation of management fees, agent trailer fees and register fee rebates. This enables reporting to be automatically generated for delivery to Northern Trust’s clients, their distribution agents and investors.
“Across the fund industry, there is a growing need to give promoters greater flexibility around the commission payment terms they can offer to their distribution agents,” says Mark Schoen, head of asset servicing product management in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). “Developments to our transfer agency engine, such as the fee rebate module which automatically generates reports which are available at both detailed and summary levels, is just one of the ways we are improving our transfer agency product offering to help our clients.”
As part of Northern Trust’s focus on increasing straight-through processing (STP) for its EMEA client base, it has also implemented an interface with major message exchanges and fund distributors. By developing interfaces from Northern Trust’s UK and offshore transfer agency systems with major distribution and message exchanges, the number of STP transactions is increased.
“At Northern Trust our focus is on working with our clients to design solutions that support their specific business needs,” says Toby Glaysher, head of Northern Trust’s Global Fund Services business in the UK. “These enhancements are among a series of steps we are undertaking as part of our continuing focus to minimize manual processing and improve risk management.”
As administrator to clients’ collective investment funds, Northern Trust provides transfer agency services that include investor registration, investor and distribution agent servicing, dealing and settlement and management company reporting.