Maitland Fund Services makes it work (better), from home

A lot has been written about the pros and cons of home working — and how businesses are adapting to an environment where some remote work is a feature of most professionals’ lives.

At Maitland, we have been working from home since March 2020. Like everyone, we were forced to adapt in a very short space of time with little to no consideration of the impact it would have on our business.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, what resulted was an overall increase in productivity, a decrease in error rates and almost unanimous improvements in client satisfaction.

Maitland Fund Services has offered independent third-party administration services since 1990, and ManCo services since 2014. We administer funds for 120 direct investment managers and 22 fund sponsors and have $200bn in assets under administration with $17bn in assets under management.

It’s fair to say that the downward trend in error rates had started before the pandemic. This is generally the result of a sustained period of process refinement, automation, and the use of robotics rather than immediate interventions. Understandably, there was a real concern that the shift to remote work would undo that progress, but in reality, the new environment further galvanised us to improve and/or automate our processes; reduce laborious manual keying; and implement new controls to cope with a lack of physical oversight.

Teams that had worked together for a long time pre-pandemic made the transition to home working particularly seamlessly: these co-workers had a strong established rapport and were able to collaborate effectively right from the off. Teams with new joiners took a bit more work, though the pandemic period was, of course, characterised by very low staff turnover across the workforce — this continuity was surely another factor aiding accuracy.

We found that staff tailored their days more. Someone might walk the dog during a period where they were waiting on information from a client or data provider, yet then be willing to log back in after dinner to make final checks.

This flexibility enables a better use of time and more effective staggering of work. However, this can also lead to certain individuals losing the ability to “switch off”, therefore promoting a healthy work-life balance has become even more of a priority. 

Ever-present regulatory drivers have also played a part. Certain markets have imposed penalties for trades that fail to settle when contractually due. This had an impact on many of our clients and drove improvements in our collaboration with them to avoid incurring unnecessary costs. The general data protection regulation (GDPR) and Protection of Personal Information Act (Popia) has also continued to drive improvement in our data handling and information security. While this category may have seen an increase in incidents which previously may not have been reportable (internally or externally), the additional governance has initiated some invaluable problem-solving and process enhancements. 

Unlike many in the industry, we are not going back to the office full time and will mirror the “hybrid-light” model used at our new parent company, the Apex Group. We do encourage our people to make use of the office as and when they want to, according to personal preference, or should the need arise for specific individuals or teams.

With this arrangement comes an underlying determination to preserve our people-based culture: We are not a fintech and we do not live and die by our code. Yes, we have top-class systems and software — but all that becomes by-the-by if your people are disengaged. For many people the adjustment has been extremely challenging from a personal perspective, and often these challenges are harder to overcome than optimising an inefficient process.

As we celebrate the success of our automation efforts, we continue to place just as much focus on our people as our systems by taking every opportunity to learn and improve.

• Craig Todd is service head: investment operations, Maitland.

This article was paid for by Maitland.

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