As 2018 comes to a close, it’s time to think about strategies to make 2019 your best year yet. Solutions that just “got the job done” in the past year do not cut it anymore as firms and industry professionals are looking to innovate and optimize existing processes. If you’re a fund company brainstorming ways to bring your business to the next level in 2019, we have a New Year’s Resolution to add to your list: improve counterparty relationships and communications.
As we discovered in an industry survey with Ignites, counterparty communication is the most neglected back-office function, and fund changes remain one of the most time-consuming and risky processes for distributors (i.e. Broker Dealers, Bank Trusts, and Record Keepers) when trading mutual funds. The manual, inconsistent nature of the communication process leaves both sides vulnerable to human error and misinterpretation. Not to mention the amount of time lost to tedious administrative tasks that could be better spent on value-added strategies.
FundBlast: What is it?
The traditional communication process between funds and distributors looks something like this: Fund company makes a change to a fund (whether it’s a merger, liquidation or change in fee structure), and sends out a blast email to all of its counterparties. The message may come with an attached PDF or Excel document, or typed out long-form in the email itself. This lack of consistency in the communication process leaves distributors with the burdensome task of sending multiple emails back and forth for further clarification. In many cases, distributors receive updates that are not relevant to them, meaning they just wasted time and effort communicating changes they shouldn’t have received in the first place.
2018 was another year of massive change across the entire financial services industry, with technology disrupting processes that had previously kept the industry stagnant. Along with this wave of change came the inception of Delta Data’s FundBlast, a connection portal that enables secure, automated communication between funds and their distributors. This streamlined communication process filters out fund events that are not relevant to distributors and standardizes the messages so that the distributors know exactly what action they need to take upon notification. On top of that, we’ve made FundBlast available to funds free of charge to facilitate adoption and help us work together to ease the interpretation for distributors on the other side.
Delta Data Innovations
Our resolution for 2018 was to make our clients’ lives easier by automating some of these outdated manual processes. In the New Year, we will be continuing to put innovation at the forefront of what we do, to make sure our clients stay ahead of the change. We encourage you to join us and look forward to seeing how the industry evolves as new technologies and solutions are brought into the fold.
Want to learn more about FundBlast? Contact us for a demo today.