Fund managers, software must adopt common standards to share data: Dunne

The software industry and fund management industry need to move towards developing common standards for straight-through processing between software programs and investment platforms to bring more efficiency to financial planners, according to Fiducian’s head of technology, Alan Dunne.

Dunne said there had been some attempts to develop common standards, but they hadn’t had much “traction”.

“This whole industry needs to move towards some standards of data interchange [with platforms],” he said.

“At this stage, it’s limited in a sense that the planning software might take a bit of information and repopulate forms, but then you’ve still got to go online and complete them and send them so they get sent through to the back-end of the platforms,” he said.

The idea of straight-through processing is still way off and there is no common standard agreed upon by all the fund managers, he said.

Even where companies, such as InvestmentLink, have developed electronic application forms, they aren’t taken up by the fund managers and fed through to the back-end of their systems, Dunne said.

The main problem in the financial crisis was getting the industry to commit to common data-sharing standards when there would be no clear benefit for the companies involved, he said.