Telstra Super has bought a private equity administration and reporting system, Private I, to streamline the valuation of its $700 million program.

The portfolio manager for alternative assets at the $10 billion fund, Nicole Connolly, said Telstra Super now retained relationships with seven different private equity fund-of-funds and seven direct private equity managers. “We had been putting all of the data on capital calls, distributions and valuations into spreadsheets, but it was beginning to get very complex,” Connolly says. “Uploading it into Private I will give us a more accurate reflection of the performance. We’ll be able to get the internal rate of return for the total program at any point in time, as well as snapshots of how our buy-out portfolio is performing against our venture capital portfolio and so on.” Connolly said Telstra Super had not seriously considered a third-party outsourcing solution, arguing that an internally-updated software solution was more cost-effective. She admitted that the implementation of Private I, which was purchased from its US vendor Burgiss Group just before Christmas, was labour-intensive in its early stages. “We’re entering all of our domestic private equity data back to 1998 which is a fair bit of work. Burgiss Group could have done it for us but we elected to do it ourselves,” she said.