Recognising the exponential increase in the automation of transactions within the global funds industry, Denmark-based AP Pension has selected Calastone, the global funds transaction network,to provide its order routing services to underpin its administration platform for cross-border trading.

AP Pension administers approximately DKK 100bn of institutional assets from around 2,000 corporate pension schemes across UCITS funds, separate accounts, internally managed and various alternative investment funds.

Through using Calastone, AP Pension was able to immediately benefit from full visibility of the lifecycle of the order and reduce market risk without requiring any implementation, integration or development costs.

Calastone allows all parties in the process – be it the fund manager, third party administrator or distributor - to use a single line of communication by translating the message into a common form, determined by AP Pension.

Jon Willis, Chief Commercial Officer at Calastone, said: “Smaller distributors, such as AP Pension, traditionally chose to remain on manual processing as they believed the implementation costs far outweighed the benefits of finding an STP order routing solution. This is no longer the case.

“Our EMS portal provides an easy and cost free option for smaller fund managers and distributors. They choose to ’upload’ consolidated orders or, for single trades, use the ‘direct order entry’ option. The latter is becoming increasingly popular where clients have a small number of trades and have previously used a manual process of emailing or faxing the orders.”

Once connected to Calastone, distributors gain access to every fund provider available on the Calastone network without any additional development. 

AP Pension Senior Portfolio Manager, Birgitte Sandberg Jensen, said: “I had a demonstration of the system via Webex and a week later I was sending my trades. I received a complete pack on how to use the system together with a formal testing pack, which I had to complete before I could request to go live. The system is very user-friendly.  I was fully supported by the Calastone Operations team, who then made moving into production exceptionally easy.  I felt comfortable at all times that there was minimum implementation risk due to the strict process and controls Calastone have in place and at every step they were there to guide me and ensure I was completely comfortable.  I was able to pass this knowledge on very easily within my team.”