Queensland Treasury Corporation: transformation delivers single source of truth

As the Queensland government’s central financing authority, Queensland Treasury Corporation (QTC) plays a pivotal role in securing the state’s financial success. The organization manages the state of Queensland’s debt requirement of over AUD 90 billion, providing the lowest cost of funds to the Queensland Government. It borrows funds in the domestic and global markets in the most cost-effective manner, and in a way that minimizes liquidity risk and refinancing risk.

Like many treasury corporations, QTC was looking for ways to increase efficiencies yet lower costs. The projects it finances range from the energy sector—the state owns transmissions and power lines—to the rail company, ports and local governments and councils. With the State’s debt more than doubling in the past 10 years, the refinancing risk also grew—creating a catalyst for change in QTC’s systems and processes.

QTC turned to Openlink to create a single source of truth for market data that had been stored across different systems and required a whole team to reconcile. Openlink was selected on its ability to hit deadlines, its legacy of strong partnership and its openness to work collaboratively on solving problems.

The project development took place during the course of a massive organizational change program, to simplify systems, redesign structure and embed a new culture. Key to the success of the project were key decisions made by the executive management team, who were all held accountable for the project’s success. The project was also designated as one of fundamental business change, not just an IT project.

As Rupert Haywood, Managing Director of Risk and Financial Operations states, “Many people thought we were taking a huge risk by turning on the system.” However, the value was immediately clear with an increase in productivity that allowed the bandwidth of each employee to maximize their impact on client-facing projects, not back-office processes.

The team can now accurately assess P&L at the end of each day. Board reports that used to take five days are now generated in four hours. This allows the team to turn their attention to more strategic initiatives like scenario testing and risk management. By redeploying staff, QTC is not only seeing higher levels of staff engagement, but the Openlink system also allows the organisation to lower costs while offering better service.

As part of their transformation, having a consolidated view of the business has allowed QTC to be more effective in the value it delivers to the State of Queensland. Increasingly, it is playing a strategic role in bigger picture initiatives that identify ways to save the Queensland Government money and add whole-of-state value. This role is becoming increasingly important as governments are now charged with bringing new innovations to their constituents while making more effective use of every tax dollar.

Publish date: June 2018