La Trobe Financial saves time and money with better liquidity planning

In four years, Australia’s premier alternative asset manager La Trobe Financial tripled the size of its assets under management. Existing technology and processes for liquidity planning couldn’t keep pace. La Trobe Financial can now analyze its growing portfolio faster and better with Anaplan. The company can also make trades more quickly and create monthly reports on their assets 98% faster.

Founded in 1952, La Trobe Financial is among Australia’s leading alternative asset managers. The company also provides residential mortgages and commercial loans, which have proved incredibly popular.

“We’ve seen phenomenal growth over the past five years,” explains Gary Bell, Chief Liquidity Officer at La Trobe Financial. “Our assets under management tripled to $20 billion, but our staffing numbers haven’t. We’ve been able to improve operational efficiencies by getting smarter and better at the way we do things.”

La Trobe Financial carries out our regular liquidity and cashflow planning, and those processes grew more complex as the business expanded. “We carried out liquidity and cashflow modelling primarily using spreadsheets,” Bell remembers. “We would spend time updating spreadsheets before we could work on modelling. With a team of 10 people working with different datasets, keeping everyone aligned on the data got in the way of planning.”

Maximizing return on efficiency

Following a comprehensive review process, La Trobe Financial selected Anaplan as its platform for liquidity planning. “What’s really important with planning in the liquidity space is not so much the knowns of what those flows are, but it’s also the unknowns,” Bell explains. “Planning helps bring all that together — helps us to change course and take corrective action.”  

When Bell and his colleagues log in to Anaplan, they can immediately view current key liquidity metrics. “From my Anaplan dashboard I can see what’s happening not just today, but in five days or even in five weeks’ time,” says Bell. La Trobe Financial’s Anaplan dashboard includes a red/amber/green traffic-light system to monitor liquidity strategies, with anything flagged as red being quickly brought back into green. “I like using this system,” Bell says. “It gives me the insights I need, and I trust it.”

Gaining a clearer view of the road ahead

With liquidity planning in Anaplan, La Trobe Financial has immediate transparency and detail around its financial positions. “We can break down data into inflows by state, region, and other subsets of data,” Bell explains. “It’s given us a level of granularity and time dimensionality that we lacked before. We can better see where we’ve come from and then where we’re going. It means that we can run more efficiently.”

Time-consuming data aggregation activities are a thing of the past, Bell says: “With Anaplan, we all share the same information, and we only need to load it once.”

With Anaplan, La Trobe Financial has achieved up to 98% time savings for producing portfolio and asset-mix reports. “We’ve been able to add additional modelling and reporting in Anaplan of historical flows that we report each month and publish on our website,” explains Bell. “Previously, these reports took us two days to create, but we can now do them in two hours.”

But most importantly, accelerated processes have delivered rapid decision-making and action. “My time is now available to decide what we buy, what we sell, and to transact in a timely manner,” Bell explains. “Waiting two days to settle a trade when we should do it today costs money. So doing those things faster means that we save time and money.”