With Aviva and Navigator joining the service, financial institutions signed up on Calastone electronic order routing service account for over 50% of all fund orders originating from Singapore fund distributors.

Calastone has experienced considerable growth in the Asia-Pacific region in terms of new clients and transaction volume. 25 fund distributors and over 70 domestic and cross-border fund managers are now signed up to the Calastone transaction network in this region alone. This makes the region a high priority for Calastone, which at present globally has in excess of 500 clients on its funds transaction network.

Peter Gibson, Chief Operating Officer, Navigator said: "We have been analysing all the available options for fund processing automation in Singapore and we selected Calastone because they were able to meet our selection criteria.  Moving from manual fund dealing and reconciliation processing to a fully automated environment will benefit all parties in the fund distribution chain.  For end-investors, our ability to automate the process means we'll have the capacity to bring on board more funds, which ultimately means that investors get more choice."

Matthew Yong, Head of Investor Services at Aberdeen Asia said: "In the last two years we have been working closely with Calastone in Asia to increase automation rates. When these two Aberdeen distributors go live we expect to reach about 60% STP rates in our Singapore Unit Trust via Calastone. This is a fantastic opportunity for the Singapore fund industry to stay at the forefront of technology and become a competitive and innovative domicile to register and distribute funds across Asia."

Sebastien Chaker, Head of Asia at Calastone said: "In less than eighteen months we have automated fund orders in Singapore from bank distributors, insurance companies, specialised fund platforms and securities houses through to the largest Singapore domestic and cross-border fund managers and their respective transfer agents. This creates a unique opportunity for all fund managers distributing funds in Singapore to leverage our existing live automated messaging network to automate the bulk of their fund orders and thereby significantly reduce costs and risks associated with this process.  Our philosophy is to make it as easy as possible for any fund distributor and fund manager, whatever their size or location, to embrace automation by minimising IT and project resources required to join and go-live on our network. We are delighted to welcome Aviva and Navigator to our growing fund distributor community in Singapore, and we will work closely with them to achieve their desire of eliminating manual processing from the fund dealing and reconciliation process."

Aviva and Navigator are also the first clients in Singapore to subscribe to Calastone's statements service to automate their holdings reconciliations with fund providers.