Cofunds, the United Kingdom’s largest independent investment platform, which provides electronic fund dealing, settlement and custody services to private wealth managers, banks, insurance companies, financial intermediaries and stockbrokers, has now started to exchange ISO standard instructions with fund management groups via SWIFT, and in collaboration with FTN, an independent cross border routing utility.
ISO20022 is the agreed target and common business model for Fund instructions. The Financial Messaging Investment Roadmap to achieve this has recently been published by FIX, ISITC (International Securities Association for Institutional Trade Communication) and SWIFT.
Cofunds messaging via SWIFT has already reached that standard.
SWIFT is the industry-owned co-operative supplying secure, standardised messaging services and interface software to over 8,100 financial institutions in 208 countries and territories. It is the de facto standards body for interbank communications.
Historically, SWIFT has been used by larger international institutions to communicate with each other but was not always perceived as easily adaptable to meet the needs of smaller businesses with retail client bases.
Cofunds volumes, boosted by its rapid growth in both the retail and institutional markets, are now on a scale where using SWIFT makes financial and administrative sense both for the platform and its larger client firms. This new aspect of the service helps client firms reduce costs, improve automation, and manage risk. SWIFT has meanwhile made significant progress towards making access to its network easy and less costly for firms with smaller volumes.
The collaboration is aimed at producing a consistent direction for financial services messaging standards and communicating that clearly.
“We are delighted that we are now able to offer our clients the option of communicating with us via SWIFT,” says Christopher James, institutional services director at Cofunds. “We have worked closely with SWIFT, FTN and the pilot fund groups to make this happen.
“As in other areas of our business, our objective is to offer our clients choice in how they want to administer their back office. For many, SWIFT is a natural and economic choice but we will not be prescriptive. With the new Roadmap, there will in any case be more flexibility around the broader acceptance of open standards. This will be a benefit both in terms of reducing back office costs and in helping bring forward the acceptance of common formats for data transmission.”