SYDNEY, Australia – 22 January, 2009 - Avanade Inc., a global IT consultancy, today announced the completion of a project designed to optimise the capacity and performance of the market leading Wrap Administration Platform from BT Financial Group, the wealth management arm of Westpac. The Wrap Administration platform allows investors to manage investments seamlessly from a single location.
BT Financial Group’s Wrap Administration Platform is a holistic superannuation and investment platform offering a suite of account solutions which meet the needs of all types of investors and allows advisers to tailor portfolio solutions for their investors. It offers up to 650 investment choices for advisors and their clients as well as easy administration and consolidated reporting for individual investors, partnerships, trusts, companies and self-managed super funds.
BT’s Wrap platform has experienced rapid expansion, with the platform currently managing over $30 billion in funds and being utilised by more than 5,000 advisors and 130,000 investors across Australia. This expansion prompted the business to enhance its database platform to provide a more responsive and reliable customer experience while keeping overheads low.
An initial pilot to migrate the system indicated considerable performance improvements could be achieved by transitioning to Microsoft SQL Server 2005. BT then commenced the full migration enabling them to meet business demands. BT has since seen improvements across the business, including greater performance, reduced maintenance times and significantly faster delivery of key business processes.
Paul Spiteri, Head of Wrap & Investment Solutions Technology, BT Financial Group, said: “Over recent years, Wraps have become increasingly important in the Australian market and are now widely used across the country. Sharply increasing numbers of customers, funds under administration and transactions have lead to the need to scale the Wrap Platform to accommodate the significant growth and the evolving needs of our current and future customer base. We looked at several different ways to meet this challenge and decided that investing in a database migration to Microsoft technology provided a scalable, cost effective long term solution.”
Avanade – which specialises in the Microsoft platform – working closely with the BT Team, planned and successfully migrated BT’s database technology to Microsoft SQL Server within 24 hours and without incident.
Spiteri commented on BT’s decision to engage Avanade, an Enterprise Microsoft Partner. “When you are investing heavily in a key platform you need to ensure the company chosen has the right expertise and experience to help de-risk the project. Avanade has the deep Microsoft skills and proven delivery track record we needed for a successful migration,” he said. “The successful results we have seen certainly support this decision.”
Nic Savage, Head of the Wrap Customer Service Centre, BT Financial Group, added: “The migration has reduced the time required for End of Day to run. This process is a key dependency for vital business functions and a faster, more robust End of Day will ensure that our staff can begin their work on time each morning to service our customers’ business.”
Jeyan Jeevaratnam, Vice President, Business Development, Avanade Australia and New Zealand, said: “Increasingly, we are seeing Microsoft technology implemented in the most important parts of our financial services customer base. BT Financial Group’s decision to migrate to SQL 2005 for their Wrap platform is another example. This was a highly successful engagement and we are very pleased to partner with BT Financial Group for this project.”
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About Avanade - Avanade is a global IT consultancy dedicated to using the Microsoft platform to help enterprises achieve profitable growth. Through proven solutions that extend Microsoft technologies, Avanade helps enterprises increase revenue, reduce costs and reinvest in innovation to gain competitive advantage. Avanade consultants deliver value according to each customer's requirements, timeline and budget by combining insight, innovation and the talent of our global workforce. Avanade, which is majority owned by Accenture, was founded in 2000 by Accenture and Microsoft Corporation. Avanade has more than 9,000 professionals serving customers in 22 countries worldwide. Additional information can be found at www.avanade.com/au
Kate Boulby
Howorth
02 8281 3825
