Fund administration runs on legacy systems, manual reconciliation, and spreadsheets. It has for decades. The industry knows this. What's changing: on-chain fund operations are now production-ready, not theoretical.
The shift is from probabilistic to deterministic compliance. In traditional fund admin, every step requires a human: NAV calculation, investor reporting, capital calls, distribution waterfalls. Each touchpoint adds latency, error risk, and audit complexity. Remove the human from the loop and you remove the variance.
Smart contracts encode the business rules. Capital call triggered? Logic executes. NAV calculated? Computation is transparent, verifiable, on the ledger. Distribution waterfall? Deterministic. Auditable. No spreadsheet formula that someone accidentally overwrote.
This doesn't eliminate fund administrators. It changes what they do. Instead of processing transactions manually, they orchestrate automated workflows. Instead of reconciling, they handle exceptions. The spreadsheet doesn't get faster - it gets replaced.
Settlement is where the difference is most visible. Traditional: T+2, reconciliation teams matching records across custodians, transfer agents, fund accountants. On-chain: atomic finality. The transaction completes or it doesn't. No settlement risk sitting in the system. No reconciliation breaks to investigate on Monday morning.
Regulators are building the framework. The EU's MIP and Settlement Finality Regulation give legal certainty to DLT-based settlement. Switzerland's DLT Act covers tokenised securities. These aren't sandboxes - they're production-ready legal frameworks that auditors and compliance teams can rely on.
For allocators running ODD on a fund, the questions are changing. How is the control framework encoded? Are audit trails immutable? Is risk monitoring continuous or periodic? Funds that can answer these questions with on-chain evidence will pass due diligence faster.
The path is hybrid. Keep the traditional systems running. Shift execution and control logic to an on-chain layer progressively. Not TradFi versus DeFi - both, integrated, each doing what it does best.
