InfoComp announces Conductor – Platform neutrality means all Australian fund managers can reduce transaction times and administration costs via Conductor-enabled STP.

SYDNEY, December 15, 2003: Australian financial services software provider, InfoComp, today announces the development of a new product to deliver Straight Through Processing (STP) for fund management – Conductor.

Based on open standards, Conductor is platform neutral and will enable STP to Composer, Australia’s leading fund administration platform, as well as other third party platforms.

Robert DeDominicis, Managing Director of InfoComp said, “STP appeared to be an unattainable goal for fund managers for quite some time. To find a solution, InfoComp has worked closely with its customers and the various industry bodies resulting in the development of Conductor.”

By enabling STP via Conductor, fund managers can now dramatically reduce turnaround time and manual processing effort for transactions such as Managed Fund Applications or Superannuation Rollovers.

This reduction in transaction processing time is achieved by eliminating the need to re-key data at each stage of any given transaction.  This also ensures compliance, reducing error rates that require time consuming and expensive human intervention.

Currently, there are a high number of transactions requiring human intervention because of the number of parties involved and the difficulty in enforcing complex business rules.

“By running Conductor in conjunction with Composer or any other administration system, fund managers can validate the business rules associated with any given transaction faster than ever before.  Simply, Conductor will reduce transaction processing time and the cost of administration,” said Mr DeDominicis.

For investors, reduced processing time and administration costs for fund managers and financial advisors has the potential to result in a reduction in their administration fees.  Additionally, by streamlining registry administration investors should benefit from an improvement in customer service.

Ray Tubman, Product Manager for Conductor said, “Conductor and its various adaptors were developed in J2EE and are based on practical experience InfoComp gained through installing its Composer platform in complex environments such as Wraps, Master Trusts and Retail Trusts.”

Scheduled for launch in the first half of 2004, Conductor will be capable of processing XML-based messages, including the industry accepted transaction formats issued by the Investment and Financial Services Association through swimEC.

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About InfoComp

Established in 1988, InfoComp has evolved to become a provider of first class software solutions to the financial services sector.  Since inception, InfoComp has achieved consistent growth and profitability and currently boasts a client list that includes some of the largest and most respected corporations in Australia.

InfoComp's software solutions, Composer (Funds Administration), Conductor (Electronic Messaging) and Unison (Registry processing) are based on open standards and incorporate products from leading technology suppliers including Sybase, Staffware, eistream, Adobe and Data Junction.