The Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) holds overall responsibility for maintaining the financial stability and efficiency of the NZ financial system.
ESAS / Austraclear is the wholesale settlements system which settles over NZ$30B each night in interbank settlement and member trading activities.
With the system built in the early 1990’s, by 2005 the business challenge had clearly become how to ensure that the application was robust, supported and had the confidence of the industry. Compounding the risks posed by the age of the system, was a need for functional upgrades to meet change in online trading behaviors, and changes to the support commitment from Oracle.
Released in late 2007, the new version of the system has been converted to a rich-client Java application, served by a WebLogic EAI layer and based on an Oracle 10g database. The business criticality of the system resulted in a tremendous focus on ‘zero-defect code’ and this translated to the high quality of the final system in production. A measure of the meticulous planning for this large-scale technology refresh was that the new system was launched in late 2007 within two weeks of the plan first set in early 2005 - unheralded delivery accuracy in a sector often noted for date slips in complex projects.
The upgraded application provides the Bank with a modernised, future-focused and secure application that retains all the operating efficiencies of a modern yet familiar interface.
Bank commitment to ongoing functional enhancements can (and has) now been made to the industry and the modernised system represents an efficient trading platform that the industry can be confident in.