So far 13 Cantonal banks have signed up for the service and moved into live production, which is based on Coexis's Syn~Orders application.

Swisscanto's Cantonal bank clients can now route orders, either directly to a series of custodians administering funds offered by the Swisscanto Group, or through to more than 70 fund providers round the globe. Orders can be submitted electronically or through a web service which provides completely integrated access to extensive fund data as well as providing capture and monitoring facilities. The service provides, where appropriate, comprehensive order aggregation and NAV deadline management capabilities. The system has allowed the banks to carry out all mutual fund trading through a single system, with consequent cost savings and efficiencies.

Mark O'Brien, Associate Director of IT & Operations, said:

"The initial driver for this project was the need to find a solution for processing orders in funds at our clients' offices, in a system that was specifically designed for the purpose. We had already helped to bring to market the Syn~Orders solution, which we use internally, but were reliant on third party supplier systems for the initial order capture, and subsequent routing of orders to us, from the client end. These systems were largely based on equity order routing systems, and could not handle well, the unique and specific terminology and business processes of the mutual fund market, and so, a purpose-built solution was necessary. The extension of the Syn~Orders system into the ASP service allows our clients to use the benefits of our system functionality at their offices, whilst maintaining a very high degree of STP. We fully expect the remaining Cantonal banks to be live in the production environment by the end of the year. The next stage would be to offer an "extension" to the functionality to our clients for deadline management on their own client-side, together with the opportunity for them to further enhance their own internal systems by interfacing directly into the Syn~ASP servers, which we can do in a variety of protocols that include FIX, Swift and XML."

Security was a key concern, and the service operates through a secure IP network created by Swisscanto. The routing system uses Coexis Syn~Orders to allow highly secure data partitioning and segregation within a single copy of the product, thus simplifying data and service management. Syn~Orders is a grid application, allowing incremental and seamless scaling as the order flow grows and new clients join.

Syn~Orders supports mutual fund order management activities of both principal intermediaries/supermarkets, and banks needing to manage internal order flow from branches or directly from clients, and could even be used at the transfer agent or custodian end. The process-oriented, rules-based system manages order capture, deadline management, order consolidation, execution allocation and notification, and transaction enrichment, leading to virtually 100% STP rates. It can be operated as part of Syn~Settlements to deliver an end-to-end solution and is available as an in-house solution or on an ASP basis.