The tech threat to fund admin jobs

Will new fund admin technology sound the death knell for jobs in the sector?

Hopefully not: people working in the industry say it's more likely to cut the donkey work.

The most obvious targets for job cuts are in the areas of pricing and reconciliation, which lend themselves to automation because of the legwork involved in, say, a net asset value calculation (NAV).

Charlie Woolnough, director of business development at Fortis Investments, simply thinks the focus of the jobs will change: "These jobs will be reduced over time. However, an appropriate level of human oversight and sign-off by qualified individuals at each stage in the NAV process is still required. While automation can reduce some of the burden, there is no substitute for experienced employees."

Gavin Nangles, head of business development at State Street, which employs 2,000 people in Ireland, agrees: "The reality in the fund servicing world is that products are getting increasingly complex and this is driving the enhanced automation, but there will continue to be a significant level of human intervention."

With the number of tech systems proliferating by the month, Woolnough says the most prized skills in the automation era are likely to be data transfer and integration: "There is a need to interact with a growing number of systems in order to share and collate portfolio, risk and accounting data."

That's not to say Irish jobs are secure. As these processes become more standardised, they could become an outsourcing target to save costs, with jobs flowing out of Dublin and into, say, Mumbai.

Woolnough says there's no current cause for concern: "Where administrators are building new, front-end, client-facing systems, they will at some stage require input from experienced hedge fund operations professionals who typically reside in Dublin."

The Holy Grail remains straight-through processing though, which would make this debate a moot point as the need for human intervention disappears completely. However, with the mass of paperwork contained within fund subscription documents resembling an explosion at a confetti factory, we're still currently a long way off.