Client story Perpetual Treasury Intelligence

Perpetual Limited is an ASX-listed, diversified financial services company that has been serving clients since 1886. One of the company’s core businesses, Perpetual Corporate Trust (PCT), is one of Australia’s leading providers of corporate trustee services to the managed funds industry and debt markets. 

Insight is the company’s go-to provider for all things Microsoft, including Azure, Microsoft Dynamics, Power Platform, SharePoint, data and analytics platforms, and security.

Perpetual’s clients include Australian treasury and finance teams that work with large and highly complex datasets. Tasks are time-consuming and involve iterative processes. Clients in this space also had to navigate complex modelling, often using only spreadsheets, creating significant operational risk and a lack of transparency and accountability. And they had limited ability to scale. 

Faced with these challenges and wanting to create a new innovative solution with a unique value proposition to its clients, Perpetual set about developing a new digital product – and Insight was the ideal partner. 

"Technology is absolutely one of the most important enablers of business success. It really is the heartbeat of innovation, service excellence and how we continue to improve our services going forward. The partnership with Insight has been instrumental"- Richard McCarthy, Group Executive, Perpetual Corporate Trust

The Perpetual Intelligence platform is a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service platform built on Microsoft Azure, with a holistic suite of products supporting workflows, automated data management and analytics. It was created to enable the digital transformation of Perpetual’s banking and financial services clients by automating key finance, treasury, funding, credit, risk and investment processes.

With Insight’s help, Perpetual gained a purpose-built solution that is 100% cloud native. Microsoft products used include Active Directory, Azure Data Factory, Azure DevOps, Power BI, SQL Server Analysis Services, and Microsoft Synapse. 

"Insight provides a whole range of products, services and people who are experts in their field. Not only do we have the ability to bring end-to-end product management delivery testing capability, but we’re also able to test and learn from what Insight is learning around the globe. It has been really valuable to us to be able to develop our own capabilities while being supported by Insight’s strong capabilities." - Richard McCarthy, Group Executive, Perpetual Corporate Trust

The platform has transformed the Perpetual client experience by: 

• Simplifying workflows with an intuitive user interface that reduces complexity and manual work 
  
• Allowing users to specify their desired asset pool outcomes, leveraging powerful algorithms, big data processing and rules engines to do the heavy lifting in trust management 
• Efficiently building, configuring and operating trust cashflow waterfalls, using powerful logic and rules engines that only require Excel skills, not proficiency in computer programming. 

Overall, the platform provides the scalability, automation and governance needed to transform Perpetual’s services, especially in funding pool selection, trust establishment and trust management.

“What was once a very time-consuming and complex iterative process can now be done at scale with great efficiency and assurance of compliance with any credit conditions or covenants, or business constraints.” – Matthew Neece, Head of Product, Perpetual Digital

The new platform has had a tremendous impact on the efficiency of Perpetual’s services. Treasury teams used to spend days creating new funding pools, but they can now complete the task in minutes ­­– and with greater precision.

Perpetual’s long-term vision is to have a cloud platform with enhanced automation that can deliver an end-to-end solution for our clients and capital markets.