Innovation in Global Transfer Agency Solutions
Helping Our Clients Win in the Marketplace
Innovation in Global Transfer Agency Solutions
Helping Our Clients Win in the Marketplace
February 2019
By Michael DeNofrio
With many clients struggling to create consistency across geographies, BNY Mellon’s transfer agency solutions can help global leaders leverage a single point of contact for worldwide management and support.
BNY Mellon’s Mike DeNofrio, Managing Director & Head of Global Transfer Agency Operations, describes some of the latest developments around global distribution in BNY Mellon’s transfer agency services. Find out how these changes can support more efficient operations.
Can you provide a bit of color around the innovation that’s been taking place in the transfer agency space at BNY Mellon?
We come from a long history of leadership and innovation in the mutual fund industry. I think many understand and realize that we were the first to bring about the omnibus recordkeeping transformation in the U.S.
Today we provide transfer agent and subaccounting recordkeeping for over 200 million mutual fund positions. We clear a significant component of the U.S. fund industry’s mutual fund trades every day and we work hard on a daily basis to bring the broker dealers and the mutual fund companies together in the marketplace.
More recently in Europe we have spent a lot of time consolidating our businesses onto a single platform which we believe sets the stage for our next push into innovation: the construction of a global transfer agent.
And so, how do we think about that? We think about a single management structure, a single leader, and a more consistent approach to the transfer agent (TA) business on a global basis. As we talk to clients throughout our footprint, more and more clients are thinking about creating leverage and opportunity on a global basis. We see many of the U.S. companies try to leverage expertise in markets across the globe. And so we think we can lead in that space by delivering the transfer agent business on a more singular, consistent and predictable basis. We’ve begun to think about how the world is more alike than different, and continue to bring together those capabilities across the globe on behalf of our clients.
How can BNY Mellon help large global clients?
One of the things that we believe is that whether we’re providing transfer agency services in the U.S., Europe or Asia—we do more things alike than different. Our goal is to find those things that are the same and create a more consistent delivery of those capabilities for our clients.
Hopefully that will make it easier for clients to take a product that they might be comfortable with in the U.S. into either the European or Asian marketplace. And we think there are a number of particular ways that we can help them with that.
One is to be more consistent in our client interactions. We really want them to feel that whether they’re doing business with us in Europe or Asia or in the U.S., that they’re doing business with a single entity in a predictable service environment.
Two is to help clients understand how to do business across different demographics. We’ve done some work in the U.S. with the cross border fund business, where we’ve taken our back office services and combined it. I think that’s innovative and new to the marketplace. For the first time, whether you’re selling a U.S. domestic fund or you’ve got an Irish domiciled cross border fund, the broker dealers are contacting the same service team. We think innovations like that from a servicing perspective will help our clients compete more successfully in the global marketplace.
How can BNY Mellon’s transfer agency strategy help clients drive operational efficiencies?
Our strategy in the transfer agency space is to create a single global TA capability. The more we talk to our largest clients we find there really is a desire to create leverage from a global operating perspective. BNY Mellon is uniquely positioned to help our clients do just that. We have critical mass from a TA perspective in the U.S., Europe and Asia. And thinking about a single global structure, a single management team, a single operations environment, and a more consistent way for our clients to do business is a strategy that we think will also help our clients compete more successfully in the global marketplace.
More specifically, we are helping clients drive efficiencies by:
- Accelerating the time to launch new capabilities by providing access to a global acceptance test team.
- Making it easier to address regulatory requirements by providing access to a single, global regulatory oversight team.
- Delivering day to day operating requirements such as fund cash reconciliation and settlement through an integrated global operations team.
Can you provide examples of how these changes drive a more consistent approach for clients?
A couple of examples of that would be a more singular approach to facing off on a day to day basis with our clients – whether they’re doing business with us in the U.S., in Ireland, in the UK or in Asia.
We spend a lot of time thinking about our distribution partners on a more consistent basis across the globe. Being linked to the providers of data and to the facilitators of trading across the globe will allow clients to do business more easily in these markets, whether it’s SWIFT or Calastone in Europe or National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC) in the U.S. We continue to look at leveraging the regulatory capabilities of our transfer agent, bringing together our European teams with our U.S. teams and bringing all of that information to the clients on a more consistent basis.
As we think about how to make it easier for our clients to do business in a global environment and take their capabilities abroad, we believe that a single, global, more predictable and consistent operational environment can only create competitive advantages for them.
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