Interview with PFS' CEO Paul Kneen

It has been a busy year for Pacific Fund Systems Limited (PFS), a global software company based in Hong Kong with offices in Australia, UK and the Isle of Man. PFS develop, distribute and support a dedicated global fund administration solution ‘PFS-PAXUS’ and its dedicated web portal ‘PFS-CONNECT’. An established market-leading product, PFS-PAXUS offers a complete back-office fund accounting, transfer agency and regulatory reporting administrative solution within a single, fully integrated application. As well as helping to providing PFS’ global client base with round-the-clock expert live support service as PFS’ European head office (to mirror their counterparts in the Australian offices) the Isle of Man based team provide the internal operations hub of the PFS’ group, with finance, sales and marketing and new projects being supported by the Isle of Man office. 2017 saw an excellent year for the group, exceeding all growth targets and signing a record number of new clients. At the helm of this thriving business is Mr Paul Kneen, an industry veteran having gained nearly three decades of experience in the establishment, administration and management of investment funds, with 20 years’ experience at senior management and board level with a number of international full-service banks, fiduciary and financial services firms. Paul joined PFS in 2015 and serves as PFS’ Chief Executive Officer. Business365' chief editor speaks to Paul to find out more about Pacific Fund Systems’ unique proposition, and what’s in store for the next chapter. See the full article here. Q: What makes Pacific Fund Systems fund administration system so unique? PK: “Pacific Fund Systems was incorporated nearly 20 years ago with one objective in mind – to build an all-encompassing, dedicated fund administration solution to form the backbone of any fund administration service providers’ business. PFS-PAXUS was designed specifically to fill the void for such a system, which did not truly exist elsewhere in the market at that time. PFS-PAXUS has continued to grow year-on-year since its launch and we believe there is currently no better multi-functional market wide product that can compete head on with PFS-PAXUS, as a total fund administration solution at an extremely competitive price point. Our objective today remains to support our clients in all that they must accomplish, helping them to navigate and automate the ever increasing regulatory and market demands of an ever-evolving funds industry. PFS-PAXUS provides our clients with efficiencies which enable them to effectively grow their client base whilst maintaining the highest levels of service to a vast range of fund structures and investment strategies”. Q: How is the industry changing, and how should Fund Administrators adapt? PK: “The ongoing challenge for administrators to improve their levels of automation, transparency and efficiency by embracing new technology, whilst simultaneously responding to pressures on reducing fees is both substantial and inescapable. The combination of increasing client and regulatory demand for ever more complex reporting and oversight has long since surpassed the point where the industry could effectively function without the levels of automation provided by technology. The speed at which technology is advancing only exacerbates the need to maintain pace, any resistance to, or delay in adopting change, will quickly result in an inability to remain competitive.  Q: What is next for Fund Administration technology? PK: “In addition to ensuring optimal software solutions are deployed, businesses must also consider their overall IT environment. Advancements in cloud technology and virtualisation continue to provide far greater scalability, accessibility, redundancy and security than traditional ‘on premise’ server technology. By reducing the in-house IT infrastructure burden, fund administrators, and businesses in general, are free to focus their resources on direct operations. Large scale In-house IT network infrastructure, including server rooms and proprietary back up data storage will become a foot note in history for the average SME – whilst a necessary component of most businesses over the last few decades, in-house network infrastructure is rapidly being retired as technology simply provides a better solution.  PFS’ is currently developing our cloud based SaaS offering. This will provide PFS clients with direct cost savings by removing the need to continually invest in optimal hardware and related networking software, (including duplication of redundancy for DRP purposes) but will also eliminate the need for clients to execute time-consuming upgrade processes as these will be performed as part of the SaaS service by PFS experts." Overall the increased automation of processes offered by applications such as PFS-PAXUS, combined with a switch to exception-based processing in particular for high volume transaction processing, will provide all early adopters of advanced technology with a strategic competitive edge. The race for further efficiency and cost reduction is of course never complete, whilst already present in areas such as payment transactions and fraud detection, artificial intelligence and distributed ledger (blockchain) will I believe, encompass the next major advancements in financial services technology.”