More than forty of Taiwan’s Funds and Banking leaders, a mix of local and global market participants, recently came together to explore the potential for ECFA to drive continued growth of Taiwan’s participation in the sophisticated global financial market.
The cross-strait ECFA or ‘Economic Co-operation Framework Agreement’ between Taiwan and China broadens trade opportunities and is extremely topical. It has the potential to accelerate Taiwan’s role in investment product creation and distribution.
The meeting also discussed practical challenges to the Taiwan financial market to ensure its operational infrastructure and technology is ready to capitalise on these opportunities as the market grows and becomes more complex.
Jones Chou, Chief Executive of JEPUN, a leader in software and consulting services in Greater China for over 15 years, opened the meeting by outlining the market conditions now likely to emerge since the signing of ECFA.
According to Jones the opportunities ahead are considerable, but market practitioners will need to address the challenge of delivering operational efficiency and transparency as the market‟s volume and complexity increases.
Jack Chen, Milestone Group’s Asia Pacific Director for Relationship Management based in Taipei, shared insights in to global best-practices being implemented by Milestone Group’s clients across Asia, Europe, North America, Australasia and South Africa, including NAV Control – “an emerging term for the one–touch validation, investigation and remediation of Unit Price or NAV related data”.
Milestone Group research indicates that a significant proportion of work effort involved in accurate funds processing, such as NAV calculation, is associated with data gathering and validation of result sets, a problem that will only deepen as competition for the international investment dollar drives greater complexity in to the Taiwanese market‟s product offerings.
Also topical during the session was the challenge for local operators to comply with the increasing regulatory and compliance rules and the challenges in relying on manual systems in unitized order management, including risks in facsimile handling, and the impact this has on transaction life-cycle management, missed deadlines and financial loss as a result of client disputes.
The event was jointly hosted by JEPUN and Milestone Group recognizing the effective business partnership between the two companies in the Asia Pacific region.
“We hope to work with each of the delegates in the coming months to deliver improved operational capability and risk reduction while enhancing the transparency that client and regulators now see as paramount in world leading service delivery.” said Jack Chen.
“We are delighted that the partnership with Milestone Group now allows us to deliver a combination of global scale funds solutions and local market expertise to our clients.” said May Yu, Sales Vice President at JEPUN.