Global funds network Calastone 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 in delivering capital markets solutions in Microsoft Azure, the companies aim to drive new opportunities for collective investments worldwide.

Calastone is leveraging its network as the foundation on which to enable the asset management industry to realize its digital transformation agenda. As investor requirements grow for accessible, low-cost and innovative ways of investing, Calastone is applying the 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 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 dynamic fund trading and data sharing across the industry, in one common infrastructure.

Calastone and Microsoft hope that their partnership, as it evolves, will deliver new capabilities that 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, Calastone’s chief technology officer, says: “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 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.”