Energy Super has gone live with a new adminitsration provider through a transition project that ran on-time and on-budget despite the severe interruption by the Queensland floods.
CEO Robyn Petrou paid tribute to the fund’s staff and the team from Financial Synergy, which managed the installation of Acurity version 7.8 to handle the 45,000 members in the $3.8 billion merger of ESI Super and SPEC Super.
“It’s been pretty intensive,” she said. “With the floods in the middle of the project, it’s a credit to all the teams that we met the April 1 deadline.
“There were some minor issues with back-processing of daily unit pricing,” she said. “We had to do this in a very short time because it was bumping into the SG quarter-end.”
Financial Synergy’s CEO, Stephen Mackley, said the installation was rare in the industry “because it was on-time and on-budget. In the industry this doesn’t happen much”.
This was due to a very robust commitment between Energy Super, Financial Synergy and Independent Fund Administrators & Advisers (IFAA) to have a “very strong steering committee and project management team”.
The Acurity admin platform was used for a total of 2.5 million members, and it would now be used by IFAA, to which Energy Super has outsourced its administration services, Mackley said in a press statement.
Petrou said Financial Synergy had dealt with five simultaneous issues in the writing and delivery of the software in the six-month timeframe. They were: changes to front-facing screens for internal staff; online information for members; moving databases from the Pervasive to SQL systems; migrating information; and insurance information [ESI was with MLC, and SPEC with CommInsure].
One of the crucial issues in the tender for the software platform was the ability to handle defined benefit payments, Petrou said, because almost 8 per cent of the new fund’s members were in a defined benefit compnent.
Mackley said one of the difficulties of administering defined benefit systems was calculating payments, “some of which can be exceedingly complex. The calculations in Acurity on-screen are visible and transparent.”
