Driving Efficiencies for Clients
Global Transfer Agency Solutions
Driving Efficiencies for Clients
Global Transfer Agency Solutions
February 2019
By Alexandra Waite
BNY Mellon’s transfer agency solutions can help global leaders streamline operations and drive efficiencies into worldwide management and support.
BNY Mellon’s Alex Waite, Head of Transfer Agency, EMEA and APAC, describes some of the latest developments around global distribution in BNY Mellon’s transfer agency services. Find out how these changes can support streamlining operations.
How can clients benefit from BNY Mellon’s investment in a global operating model for transfer agency?
For asset managers, offering their investors a consistent client experience across geographies is essential for growth. A global operating model for transfer agency (TA) enables BNY Mellon to leverage best practices across our operating locations, driving consistent delivery and efficiencies for our clients.
BNY Mellon’s existing EMEA and APAC operating model has a follow the sun element which starts the day in Asia and moves through to U.S. close. This means our clients’ investors, regardless of where they are in the world, have an appropriate entry point in each time zone. We complement this operating model with our India centers of excellence which are based out of Pune and Chennai. We combine this model with local teams in major financial centers so our staff has familiarity with local market practices and the necessary language skills to deliver support on the ground. This single, integrated operating model enables us to manage productivity and capacity efficiently for our clients.
Where have you recently consolidated platforms?
In Europe, we have spent a lot of time consolidating our platforms and today our Irish, UK and Luxembourg businesses are all being run on a single platform. We’ve recently migrated our APAC business to that platform as well, and I think it really sets the stage for what we believe is the next level from an innovation and a leadership perspective: creating a single global consistent transfer agent capability from which to serve our clients. It also means all the operations teams in the EMEA and APAC regions are working on the same platform, teams can recover cross regionally, and when we have to make changes to the system we are impacting our clients located in these multiple regions only once.
BNY Mellon provides a single point of contact to institutional investors and distributors; how does it work?
For clients located in the EMEA and APAC regions, we can avoid distributors or institutional investors having to come in multiple times across these clients with requests or instructions to the transfer agent. We have an institutional client service. This allows the distributors to come in either by our BNY Mellon branded web portal, TA Online, or directly to one single point of contact to avoid the multiple channels of communication. TA Online is becoming increasingly vital to these clients as it offers their investors an opportunity to self-serve, transact online and have a consistent experience regardless of where in the world their investors are located.
Another single point of contact that we have seen working very effectively is where clients distribute globally via the National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC) but are serviced centrally from the U.S. TA broker relationship team where they have an established and tenured relationship, regardless of the fund domicile.
How has the single point of contact been received by clients?
TA Online has been well received. What we have found is that clients are using the portal differently, to create investor journeys or to suit their own needs. The online secure messaging has resonated well, as has the ability for clients to offer investors a direct route to upload multiple transactions. We have focused on keeping the deployment simple so we can respond rapidly to new or evolving client needs.
What are the benefits of working with a single global management team?
The benefits of thinking about the transfer agent on a more global basis is really when you take a single structure, a single management team, and a culture that thinks about the things we can do and how we can create leverage on behalf of our clients from a global perspective. We think about having a single voice to work with a client on a global basis. We think about the regulatory environments and how they’re more alike than different and we think about how we react and approach incident management and testing our system upgrades so we are consistent.
If we can bring that leadership and thought process from across the globe, into the room with our clients on a regular basis and talk about things like money market reform and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and create leverage for our clients on a global basis—we think of that as value add.
We’ve looked at how our clients with multiple domiciles do business with their distributors and intermediaries across the globe and have brought that thinking into the design of our operating model. Within that management team we can be aware and respect regional differences but have an overriding team objective to deliver a joined up, seamless service to clients.
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