ASIC taps Deloitte for business registry move, drops local SME


Joseph Brookes
Senior Reporter

Australia’s corporate regulator will use consultancy giant Deloitte to manage its migration of key economic infrastructure over the next year in a move away from a local SME that had been managing it for the last 18 months.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) this week revealed it will pay Deloitte $2.76 million for a year of “program management services” under its role in the federal government’s $480 million program to modernise business registries.

The contract has options to extend, with the registries program expected to run until 2024, and follows similar service that was provided by Melbourne based consultancy State of Matter since early last year.

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ASIC has brought in outside help to manage its migration of business registries to the ATO

Led by the ATO, the Modernisation of Business Registers (MBR) program is consolidating dozens of ASIC business registries into a single new service known as the Australian Business Registry Services.

The program is the biggest digital initiative of the Coalition’s 2020 budget and aims to improve the reliability, access and ongoing costs of several existing business registers by consolidating them into a single service, which also introduces company director IDs.

ASIC is transitioning 31 of its registries to the new service, which will also contain the ATO’s Australian Business Register. Several staff have moved from ASIC to the ATO under the program, which is also relying heavily on outsourcing.

The ATO has already allocated more than $135 million to a New Zealand registries software firm and technology company Accenture, the latter recently signing a $31.5 million extension for just three months more work on the project.

Originally scoped in 2017 the modernisation project was allocated funding for design in 2018, and began in earnest last year with $420 million in last year’s federal budget for delivery over four years.

Deloitte will be responsible for the program management of ASIC’s deliverables under the MBR program, which include data migration to the ATO, expanding functionality of ASIC’s systems and the progressive retirement of the legacy technology used in ASIC registries.

ASIC is already in the delivery phase of the MBR program, including the roll out of director IDs under tranche one and the migration of company registers under tranche 2.

Melbourne based consultancy State of Matter has previously provided the program management services to ASIC for the project.

The Australian company began a contract in March 2020 which was quickly amended to double its value. Several more extensions followed, with the contract expected to finish at the end of the year at a value of $5.6 million.

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