EFAMA: Industry automation rates for cross-border fund orders reached 89.4%

29 November 2018

The European Fund and Asset Management Association (EFAMA), in cooperation with SWIFT, published a new report about the evolution of automation and standardisation rates of fund orders received by transfer agents (TAs) in the cross-border fund distribution centres of Luxembourg and Ireland during the first half of 2018.

The Mid-year report, which had twenty-eight TAs from Ireland and Luxembourg participating in the survey, combines the Luxembourg and Ireland data into one single cross-border fund processing report, providing statistical evidence on the advancement of automation and standardisation rates of cross-border fund orders. This report also provides data on standardisation levels of fund orders in Italy.

Report highlights include:

• The total order volume of cross-border funds increased by 5.4% to 20.3 million orders in the first half of 2018, from 19.3 million orders in the second half of 2017.
• The manual processing rate of orders of cross-border funds fell to 10.6% in Q2 2018 from 12% in Q4 2017. Whilst the use of ISO messaging standards decreased slightly from 55.5% in Q4 2017 to 54.7% in Q2 2018, the use of proprietary file transfer protocols (ftp) increased to 34.7% in Q2 2018 from 32.5% in Q4 2017.
• The share of manually processed orders by Luxembourg TAs declined from 14.6% in Q4 2017 to 13% in Q2 2018.  The ISO automation rate remains stable at 69.6% in Q2 2018, while the use of proprietary ftp increased to 17.4% compared to 15.6% in Q4 2017.
• The total automation rate of orders processed by Irish TAs reached 93% in Q2 2018, compared to 92.1% in Q4 2017. The use of proprietary ftp went up to 60.9% in Q2 2018 compared to 59.6% in Q4 2017, whereas the ISO adoption rate slightly decreased to 32.1% in Q2 2018, from 32.5% in Q4 2017.

Full report

© EFAMA - European Fund and Asset Management Association