Calastone Announces Strategic Partnership With Microsoft to Accelerate the Digital Transformation of Funds and Collective Investments

• Calastone and Microsoft share vision for digitally enabled collective investments and funds

• Calastone introduced its innovative DMI Fund Services solution leveraging Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) alongside existing proven technology together with its global funds network to enable digital transformation for funds market participants

• Strategic agreement will see Calastone and Microsoft deploy Calastone’s platform on Microsoft Azure and collaborate on confidential computing technologies

Calastone, the largest global funds network, has signed a partnership agreement with Microsoft, which will see the firms collaborate on the use of 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.

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Calastone is leveraging its network as the foundation on which to enable the asset management industry to realise its digital transformation agenda. As investor requirements grow for accessible, low cost and innovative ways of investing, Calastone is applying the very latest technologies to build the next generation infrastructure for the distribution of investment funds.

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

CCF is an open-source framework for building a new category of secure, highly available, and performant applications that focus on multi-party confidential compute and storage. Through Calastone’s practical experience having operated DLT since 2019, the firm 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.

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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.”

Bill Borden, Corporate Vice President of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft, said, “We’re excited to work with Calastone to enable innovation in the asset management and capital markets industries. Calastone’s DMI Fund Services, combined with Microsoft Azure and distributed ledger technology, unlocks a secure and scalable way for firms to access the critical data and insights they need to further enhance the client experience, significantly reduce operating costs, and develop new investment models.”