One tech platform fits all

case study | Perpetual
WORKING with a number of legacy systems, Australian fund manager Perpetual found the duplication of IT infrastructure and administration processes to support servicing its customers was unacceptable.

Along with the excess infrastructure costs associated with three core back-end systems, there was the training of administrative staff on each one.

In mid-2005, Perpetual's three disparate platforms included an in-house VAX/Cobol/RDB-based system that retained history - about 3 million transactions - before July 1999. This also contained term fund functionality.

The second system was a mature Bravura Solutions application that provided a platform for Perpetual's Select Multi-Manager offering. It also provided an in-house front-end with API-style query, reporting and transaction processing functionality.

The third system provided a platform for all other Perpetual Investments products. It was installed in late 2002 as the replacement platform for an in-house system. The platform increased database size by 40 per cent within 12 months of installation and this increase affected the time it took to perform maintenance and batch jobs.

Perpetual decided it needed to migrate away from its existing multiple-unit registry applications to a feature-rich, open architecture platform to reduce financial and efficiency issues.

Perpetual operations group executive Matt Pancino says the benefits were expected to be twofold.

"The first was if we consolidated our legacy platforms into a single system that would obviously save us money from an IT perspective," he says.

"Then consolidating all our customers on to one platform meant we could get much better insight into what our customers were actually using with us.

"We could also streamline our processes, and we would be able to have one set of administration processes and one set of customer services processes to support all of our customers."

Perpetual has about 1000 staff, and offices in most states. There are more than 200 users of the systems.

The company manages more than $35 billion in personal and corporate funds and has a broad range of products for personal investment, superannuation and retirement planning, and is responsible for the savings of more than 200,000 active investors.

Perpetual undertook an extensive tendering process two years ago and chose Bravura Solutions' consolidated Service Oriented Architecture unit registry system.

"We have installed their core registry platform - basically it is the Talisman suite of products with Sonata business services operating underneath it," Pancino says. "In addition to this integration, we also installed a single correspondence engine, which consolidated all the different types of correspondence we sent to our customers."

Perpetual combined the Bravura Solutions system with its own internally built workflow solution (Savvion) as well as interfaces to internal and external stakeholders, its management information systems systems and its online systems.

"We are one of the few organisations that can route work to particular people who are skilled to do it," Pancino says.

The Perpetual and Bravura Solutions teams collaborated closely over 18 months to deliver the project.

Pancino says the company has realised savings across its IT environment and transformed its customer services processes. "From a call centre perspective, we are now able to answer 90 per cent of all of our customers' queries by our people on the phones within the one system rather than having to toggle between three systems."

Pancino says keeping pace with legal and regulatory requirements has also been made simpler.

THE PROBLEM
Three disparate unit registry technology applications had to be consolidated on to a single platform to meet current and future requirements.

THE PROCESS
The company installed Bravura Solutions' consolidated SOA unit registry system and combined this with an internally built workflow system (Savvion) and interfaces to internal/external stakeholders, MIS systems and online systems.

THE RESULT
The system transformed customer services processes and delivered savings across the IT environment. The company realised a target of 90 per cent of telephone customer queries answered through the call centre screen.