Discover Benelux | Issue 12 | December 2014

Page 81

Discover Benelux |  Business |  Fundsquare

Modernizing the global distribution of funds TEXT: HARUN OSMANOVIC | PHOTOS: FUNDSQUARE

Fundsquare is a market utility that aims at making the cross-border distribution of funds simpler, faster and safer by centralising the information and automatising the fund-management process all in one place. Dominique Valschaerts, CEO of Fundsquare, explained that the Luxembourg Stock Exchange created Fundsquare after realising that, unlike the stock market, the European fund market has a very complex infrastructure. From faxes to emails, its operations follow very diverse channels of communication and processes which ultimately make the market inefficient and costly. “The platform has been piloted since 2010 by a Super User Group composed of transfer agents, distributors and asset managers, representing 70 per cent of the cross-border distributed funds in Luxembourg, and has been a success thus far,” explains Valschaerts.

Although it is a new platform, Fundsquare is the result of decades of experience. It absorbed the activities of Finesti, a highly successful fund information platform and partnered with SWIFT – who provides the backbone of the tool – and Altus, who developed the front end.

our goal is to open the capital to the users and become user-owned and user-governed,” explains Valschaerts. “Ultimately,” he continues, “our vision is to become the unique and worldwide infrastructure facilitating cross-border fund distribution between all actors on the market.”

The platform consists of three main services:

The early successes of Fundsquare are very promising and the firm is expecting a lot more companies to join the platform. “The adoption rates have been fantastic because the need is great and it just makes sense,” Valschaerts concludes.

- An information aggregator with constant updates of static and dynamic data and fund documents. - An order management service to counteract the increased operational complexity linked to cross-border distribution of funds. This includes real-time order routing and confirmation between the distributors and transfer agents. - A regulatory service to help all fund industry actors fulfil their regulatory obligations and reporting duties.

And thus, the fund industry is finally entering the 21st century. www.fundsquare.net

Because Fundsquare is a market utility built by and for the fund industry in order to fulfil a need that is very much present in the market, the ultimate mission is to further increase market efficiency by relying on the collaborative aspect of the tool. Dominique Valschaerts CEO of Fundsquare

“Although we are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Luxembourg Stock Exchange,

Issue 12 |  December 2014 |  81


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