Calastone partners with Microsoft to accelerate the digital transformation of the funds industry

By Joy Dumasia

Calastone, the global funds network, has signed a partnership agreement with Microsoft, which will see the firms collaborate on using cloud and distributed ledger technology to create market efficiency across the global investment funds industry. By combining Calastone’s network, technology and market experience with Microsoft’s expertise and track record in delivering capital markets solutions in Microsoft Azure, the companies will drive new opportunities for collective investments worldwide.

Calastone introduced DMI Fund Services, a suite of solutions that provides fund managers, administrators and distributors a fully digital operating model, enabled through cloud and DLT. In the development of DMI Fund Services, Calastone chose Azure for its reliability, security, scalability, and leading-edge confidential computing platform, including the confidential consortium framework (CCF).

CCF is an open-source framework for building secure, highly available, and performant applications that focus on multi-party confidential computing and storage. Calastone’s practical experience having operated DLT since 2019 has selected CCF as the best framework to provide the rapid scalability and security required to operate on a global scale. This will allow for transformative fund trading and dynamic data sharing across the entire industry in one common infrastructure.

As DMI Fund Services and Azure confidential computing evolve, the partnership between Calastone and Microsoft will deliver new capabilities, which will enable transfer agents, fund managers and fund distributors to transform how they operate and service their clients, and ultimately gain from the wholescale market efficiency to lower the overall cost of investing.

Adam Belding, Chief Technology Officer at Calastone, said: “The funds industry is at a turning point, with the need to innovate and digitally transform becoming the key goal of asset managers and asset servicers. We absolutely believe that this technology is the future for the funds industry and for financial services generally. We have great ambitions for DMI Fund Services and our wider product set, and so we looked to Microsoft, one of the world’s leading technology companies, with a proven expertise in enabling distributed ledger and cloud solutions for the financial services sector to help us drive towards these goals. Microsoft’s technologies and industry track record will enable the rapid scaling we see for DMI Fund Services and our global funds network generally. We are excited to share this vision with Microsoft and look forward to collaborating to revolutionize the funds sector and provide a more efficient and friction-free experience for all.”