Customer Story
New Zealand Superannuation Fund Ensures Core Investment Data is Accurately Governed with Precisely Data Integrity Suite
$46.7B
in assets
200+
employees
2001
company founded
Overview
The New Zealand Superannuation Fund (NZSF) is New Zealand’s only sovereign wealth fund. It exists to invest the capital contributions received from the government to improve the ability of future governments to pay for the universal superannuation scheme that is established in New Zealand. NZSF has been ranked as the world’s top performing sovereign wealth fund based on 10-year returns for the last three years running.
Industry
Finance & Investment
Company overview
- Headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand
- Over 200 employees
- 255 associated members
- $46.7 B in assets
Solutions
“Users are happy on the business side, and that’s really important to me – that people saw a definite improvement in the processes and a cut-down in time.”
Jill Edge, Master Data Analyst
Carhartt
Challenge
NZSF is the most successful sovereign wealth fund in the world, yet one of the main challenges it faces is a lack of data governance and data quality. To address this challenge, the organization set up an internal data services function – a team of three– to help with data governance and improve data quality. NZSF was spending millions of dollars on third-part data on market information and needed to optimize this data. At this point, the data was hard to find and, in many instances, harder to understand.
The data tech team acted as the pseudo-owner of this data and was tasked with understanding, identifying, and fixing the data quality problems that arose. This led to further issues as the data tech weren’t users of the data, investment teams had to spend additional time reconciling data rather than analyzing it and leveraging it to make informed investment decisions. In some cases, members of the data tech team spent up to 40 percent of their workday cleansing and standardizing data due to data governance and quality issues.
“Several of our teams depend on the core investment data; and our senior executives rely on the management reporting to understand the position of the fund on any given day. If that reporting is inaccurate, we run into a whole slew of new problems,” explained Geoff Smith, Head of Data Services at New Zealand Superannuation Fund. “If we can provide our teams with quality information, they’re in a better position to make sound investment decisions.”
With operational bottlenecks, limited visibility, and high dependencies on individuals, NZSF lacked accurate, consistent, and contextualized data that made it increasingly difficult to move forward, trust its data, and make sound investment decisions.
“The solutions from Precisely are simpler, faster, and much more automated.”
Geoff Smith, Head of Data Services
Solution
Data is the foundation of the organization, and without the proper framework in place, NZSF could not optimize the resources that it had invested in. As a result, NZSF’s data services team decided to leverage Precisely’s data governance solution as the foundational tool for its own data governance program. A strong data governance framework ensures that the team has centralized access to data sets, enabling them to easily find, understand, trust, and leverage critical data across the organization – leading to more accurate and informed decisions and reporting.
One of the key drivers for selecting the data governance solution is the ability to configure the metamodel to meet NZSF’s initial needs while being flexible enough to grow and become more complex as the organization’s needs evolve. Additionally, the solution provides data governance and data quality scoring features which add more context to the data.
“If we can provide our teams with quality information, they’re in a better position to make sound investment decisions.”
Geoff Smith, Head of Data Services
New Zealand Superannuation Fund
Outcome
Following implementation of the data governance solution, the data tech team saw improvements almost immediately. The team now had visibility into lineage, impact analysis, and data usage trends on all data catalog interactions, which helped establish a data governance scoring system where the core investment dataset achieved 100 percent compliance with NZSF’s governance criteria.
The team also benefited from:
Efficiency Gains
- Reduced data transformation time significantly lowers compute usage and contributes to environmental sustainability
- Automated metadata harvesting ensures the data catalog stays current without requiring manual updates
Improved User Engagement
- With roughly 200 users, consistent and repeated catalog use shows genuine utility across the organization
- Internal teams report reduced reliance on institutional knowledge, and faster data discovery and validation processes
Governance Maturity
- Data governance scores on datasets are at 98 percent, validating the maturity of stewardship on key data
“The solutions from Precisely are simpler, faster, and much more automated. Once the full rollout is done, the data catalog and data quality module will unlock even more value,” said Smith.
What’s next
The next phase of implementation will focus on data quality, which is expected to flag issues earlier in the pipeline to minimize downstream impact on analysis and reporting. NZSF plans to track KPIs such as average data quality score, exceptions, and issues resolution cycle time. This additional information will enable deeper insight into recurring issues that the team faces and will allow for proactive engagement from other business areas. One of the ways in which this will support the organization over time is by reducing individual dependencies, ensuring knowledge is accessible on an organizational level moving forward.
Data governance solutions
Find, understand, and manage data for proven business outcomes based on trusted data.