Standard Chartered Bank has launched an integrated direct and regional custody platform for its investor and intermediary clients to capture further opportunities in markets across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
The Single Touch Regional Custody Capability will enable clients to connect to the banks custody network of 39 markets in a manner that combines the benefits of a direct local account interface with regional reporting and servicing aggregation. It follows the banks roll out in the last two of regional custody offerings in the Middle East and Africa.
Domestic clients in Asia can also seamlessly transition from a single market to a multi-market offshore hub coverage model, maintaining the benefits of a direct account model while supporting investment flows that are increasingly expanding cross-border.
In an interview with Global Custodian last week, Karen Fawcett, group head of Transaction Banking at Standard Chartered, said: The platform were launching is one that gives us a completely integrated offering with real time capabilities across all of these markets. Our clients global custodians, broker dealers and fund managers will have an ability to access our platform through one window across all these markets but still have a service model as if they were going direct to market. As a full service bank in those markets across MENA and Africa we plug in custody into our current banking operation so weve got the full suite of cash and FX everywhere we go.
Chris Wooldridge, regional head of Investors and Intermediaries, Product, West Hemisphere added: Phase 1 of our re-platforming was launched 2010, and it enabled us to introduce a high level of STP to Corporate Actions. One advancement was to get to a single validated view feed for Corporate Actions data with automated sourcing of data from multi-feeds, scrubbing of corporate action events and as a result the creation of a golden copy. These enhancements to the process chain significantly reduce the risk of error in what is the industrys highest risk area.
The heightened level of automation is a big advantage for us. If a CSD has similarly advanced technology you can have STP from announcement, client notification, entitlement matching all the way through to processing the client instructions and taking the instruction to be processed back into the CSD, all fully automated.
The second phase of Standard Chartereds integrated custody platform launch involves the single instance platform, which is accessible from all markets around the world and is fully interfaced with both cash management and foreign exchange dealing platforms. The client instruction goes into the single instance platform, and is visible in near real time to both regional hub and end market. This single touch technology enables operational simplicity for securities, cash and FX with status updates and position information to be communicated to the client as they occur in the local market, says Wooldridge.
He adds: “In effect regional global becomes the same as direct custody. And potentially regional global is as cost effective as going direct as well because youre not paying for that extra layer in the middle.”Clients can decide the service relationship contract they so that for regional custody they can continue dealing with their regional service teams or have the convenience of a regional interface combined with direct access to our experienced teams in our local market.
Fawcett explained that the banks integrated offering was already available for cash management and trade finance. Were trying to build enough to adapt to the very specific needs of the different segments and this gives us the flexibility to do that.
The new platform has been launched domestically in the Philippines and Vietnam and for Regional Custody in Singapore. The platform will be incrementally rolled out across the Standard Chartereds entire custody network by 2014.
Beyond that, the bank will look to partner with other securities services providers in the markets where it is not physically present. One of the things wed be looking to do is bolster our custodian partner relationships, says Fawcett. Were doing 39 of the most difficult markets and now we need to plug in custodians who cover the rest of the world to our regions. Were seeing increasing demand and interest in that so its a natural progression for us. Its similar to what Euroclear did to Europe in the early days. It does give one settlement or clearing platform so were hoping that will be powerful.
From the equities point of view wed look at other custodians with which we have partnerships already. But we have this debate with the financial markets team. For example, as derivatives move onto exchanges and thats where collateral management comes in weve got to figure out what thats going to look like throughout Asia in terms of how much the Dodd Frank influence is going to come into Asia. One has to assume its going to so were making sure it has access to the various exchanges.
(JDC)