Standards

UK Funds Market Practice Group (UKFMPG)

The UK Funds Market Practice Group (UKFMPG) is a national constituent of the global Securities Market Practice Group (SMPG).

The objective of the UKFMPG is to facilitate more efficient processing in the UK savings and investment industry by publishing technical standards for electronic interactions between financial services organisations. UKFMPG standards are typically based on the ISO20022 message standard.

The UKFMPG is free to join and standards are collaboratively developed by a wide range of industry representatives with the best interests of consumers of UK retail financial services in mind. All standards are openly published and free for any organisation to use regardless of whether they are a member of the UKFMPG.

UKFMPG standards are published on the SMPG website (www.smpg.info) and MyStandards website (www.swift.com/mystandards). 

 

UKFMPG Transfers (aka UKETRG)

The transfer market practice (now referred to as the UK Electronic Transfers and Re-registration Group, UKETRG) addresses the transfer of investment portfolios and re-registration of assets. The original market practice released in 2012 focused on the transfer of funds and ISAs but in 2013 this was expanded to cover a much wider range of account and asset types. The market practice has been adopted by TISA Exchange and is very widely used in the UK.

The transfer market practice framework will be of relevance to:

  • Platforms and wealth managers
  • Pension providers and administrators
  • Individual Savings Account plan managers
  • Fund managers and transfer agents
  • Banks and building societies

 The transfer market practice framework covers:

  • The transfer of a range of account types including:
    • Stocks and Shares ISAs
    • Cash ISAs
    • Pensions
    • General Investment Accounts
  • Portfolios of a wide range of asset types including:
    • Cash (Un-invested cash holdings within the portfolio)
    • Funds (publicly available funds, identified with an ISIN, that are registered with a transfer agent)
    • CREST Registered Securities (which may be equities, ETFs or any other asset supported by and registered on CREST other than funds as defined above)
    • Other assets (described in unstructured free text and that will not be processed automatically)

There are two versions of the market practice currently in use. Version 1.1 covers funds and ISAs only. Support for this early version has been continued to reflect the limited requirements of fund managers.

 

UKFMPG Transfers Version 1.1

Version 3.0 went live in November 2016 and covers the full breadth of account and asset transfers listed above.

 

UKFMPG Transfers Version 3.0

 

UKFMPG Corporate Pension STP (aka ViaNova)

The ViaNova market practice is aimed at automating the interactions between pension administrators and investment fund providers including:

  • Trade instructions and confirmations including subscriptions, redemptions, switches and cancellations
  • Price reporting
  • Holding and transaction statements

The market practice was initially aimed at trust-based defined-contribution occupational pensions where it has been very widely adopted but its use has already spread to the defined-benefit pensions and the mainstream retail investment world.

The current version, 5.02, was introduced in November 2017 in line with a new version of the underlying ISO messages. The standard has been split into two documents in the latest revision – the core business requirements and the detailed ISO20022 message mapping.

Further details on the ViaNova working group can be found here: www.vianova.org.uk

 

Related content