Fund administrator Curo Fund Services (“Curo”) has further enhanced the transparency and efficiency in the pricing of investment layers within its multi-managed portfolios for its client, Old Mutual Multi-Managers. This follows Curo’s deployment of Milestone Group’s pControl platform, which is part of an investment programme to deliver market-leading administration services to multi-manager, unit trust and life company clients.

According to Paul Roberts, Managing Director EMEA of Milestone Group: “Competitive market conditions across South Africa have driven an increased focus on integrity and transparency, which has triggered firms and their service providers to look for automated solutions.”
 
“In a first for the South African market, pControl removes manual processes, which enables Curo to support the likes of Old Mutual Multi-Managers in offering complex investment structures while at the same time providing greater visibility across the business,” says Hank Pienaar, Managing Director of Curo. “This deployment is a significant step in dealing with one of the key challenges typically faced by multi-managers - ensuring the integrity and transparency of the various investment layers or ‘building blocks’ within a product portfolio.”
 
The implementation of pControl has enabled Curo to deliver more efficient and flexible administration service across a number of complex processes such as net-asset-value (NAV) unit pricing, cash allocation and rebalancing, unitised order management and income distribution. pControl's integrated reconciliation, accounting and data manager capabilities also allow Curo to provide increased end-to-end process transparency to Old Mutual Multi-Managers.
 
Russel Julie, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Old Mutual Multi-Managers added: “This allows us to further enhance our service to clients. In a traditional multi-manager portfolio administration system, inconsistencies are only detected after you’ve run through an entire day’s pricing. This may necessitate a complete rework, which could result in significant delays. pControl differentiates itself by following a sequenced validation approach for processing transactions and pricing of multi-managed portfolios. This means interventions are possible at each validation point, so we’re able to resolve inconsistencies earlier. It further speeds up the overall process in producing an output with the required level of integrity at first pass. ”
 
Since Old Mutual Multi-Manager’s clients are primarily large retirement funds who have direct access to its product portfolios, they will benefit directly from Curo’s professional asset administration services.
 
“pControl has provided Curo’s multi-manager clients with numerous benefits since going live in 2013. We look forward to supporting Curo in their future growth,” concludes Roberts.