Milestone Group is calling for a drive for operational excellence in fund accounts and related business processing, in a bid to improve fund managers’ efficiency.

The fund processing and analytic solutions provider, which was founded to address a perceived gap between the capabilities of traditional function-specific solutions and the business outcomes required, said there has been a change in the way people look at the technology they use in their daily operations.

“To date, fund accounting solutions have focused on improving valuation calculations, accounting and general ledger reporting functions,” commented Phil Davies, chief technology officer at Milestone Group. “But these solutions don’t support the wider operational efficiency outcomes that today’s businesses require. It’s time to take a step back and take a more strategic view on how technology can improve and transform business processes, instead of focusing on adding tactical changes to inflexible incumbent systems.”

Davies added that greater automation and efficiency can be brought into the fund accounting space. “The way that reporting is often handled, for example, or share classes added to balance sheets. Has become highly inefficient but deeply entrenched. Dependence on fund packs and all that their production entails slows down a business, creates an inefficient fund accountant-to-fund ratio and can strangle business agility. Much more effective to employ a technology that can automate many of these checks and validations, identify exceptions and allow them to be managed as necessary. This allows the highly-skilled fund accountants to focus on more added-value tasks, including engagement with their stakeholders and clients.”

Chief executive officer, Geoff Hodge, added that there is no reason why multiple labour-intensive functions that rely upon a range of disparate technologies cannot be combined and automated by one ‘built for purpose’ platform. “This is the approach that can deliver a big step forward for all stakeholders simultaneously,” he said.

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