The year that was, a look at 2018

Reflecting on 2018 In 2018 SuperChoice continued its core strategy of investing in its transaction platform as a service (TPaaS), to ensure our customers can digitally transact in a seamless, reliable, secure and compliant way. Let’s take a minute to reflect on some achievements that supported our customers Founding member of the ATO Working Group for Single Touch Payroll (STP) It was a huge honour to be part of the ATO’s Single Touch Payroll working group. The ATO recognised how important it was for all parties in the supply chain to work together. Our goal was to deliver a seamless, simple process that was convenient and reduced the administration burden for employers. As part of the working group we gained full transparency of the STP roll-out plans, which enabled us to test implementation and integration with our systems, plus, spot areas for improvement. We also built a test environment that mimicked the live environment of the ATO and that’s been incredibly valuable for our customers. Helping them iron out any data issues before they go-live. First Single Touch Payroll messaging provider to go-live In April we celebrated an important milestone. The first Single Touch Payroll submission was made by one of our clients (a payroll solutions provider) and was accepted by the ATO as a fully compliant report. Well ahead of the 1 July 2018 deadline.

As of 30 November 2018, we’ve messaged the ATO over 143,000 Pay Event Reports via the SuperChoice STP transaction platform as a service and that number is growing as more and more employers onboard the platform to meet deferral dates.

The SuperChoice STP solution is now supporting both existing and many new payroll solution provider partners who collectively account for 15% of all on-boarded employers in Australia representing more than 1 million or 30% of reporting employees. You can read about our experience here.

$25 million-dollar investment in our platform, One Platform to Connect

We have seen the shift towards digital transactions coming for quite few years now. Many businesses were moving to cloud-based solutions and we knew there was a pipeline of ATO initiatives coming down the line. We have invested over $25 million over the past five years modernising our transaction platform as a service. Focusing on building true micro service oriented architecture, cloud compatible and API capability, strengthening the platform for increased volumes of digital transactions and bolstering security.

Security Accreditation Data security is a huge priority for all of us at SuperChoice. So, even though we already comply with the ATO operational framework requirements (which are the highest in Australia) we wanted to go above and beyond. In December we confirmed our ISO27001 Certification for Information Security, successfully compliant in all aspects of the audit. We’ve welcomed new customers to our SuperStream Clearinghouse solution

Our experience and reliability have been recognised, with a number of large superannuation funds choosing to partner with SuperChoice.

With over 100,000 employers using our SuperStream Transaction Platform as a Service solution, we remitted over 30% of all employer contributions in 2018 – a 15% increase on the prior year.

We were delighted by this show of confidence in both our platform and product roadmap decision to offer customers solutions for not only SuperStream, but STP and upcoming ATO initiatives like Employee Commencement.

Continued growth is expected with many new STP customers indicating they want to use our SuperStream solution too.

Expanded local presence and continue our work in the UK Our team is 100% Australian based and we now have team members working in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne to deliver solutions using our digital transactions platform as a service.

We continue to support the UK market, migrating our Auto Enrolment solution that is used by Aegon employers onto Microsoft Azure public cloud infrastructure to enhance scalability and performance and progressing our growth plans.

We’d like our international footprint to expand and we’re in early discussions with a number of potential partners. Watch this space.

We asked our CEO, Stuart Korchinski about his thoughts on the year and he had this to say:

Our customers are experiencing improved functionality and expanding solutions as a result of the investment in the platform. Our customer base has never been more diverse and our platform now supports more complex transactions including SuperStream, STP and a range of SBR2 services. We play a pivotal role in facilitating relationships between Employers, Payroll Providers, Super Funds, Group Insurers, FSI’s and the ATO. Very few Transaction Platform as a Service providers could say that. I’m extremely proud of the SuperChoice team for supporting our customer benefit-centric plans. They have shown great initiative and commitment to providing the best outcome for customers. Continually delivering to tight deadlines, managing transformational change and welcoming new customers to SuperChoice without a hitch.

Our development roadmap this year was ambitious and the team delivered eight high impacting projects in addition to our substantial monthly software releases that make a difference to our customers. Only made possible because of the dedication, professionalism and hard work of our team. Thank you!

We are well placed for growth and in 2019 we will continue to invest in our capabilities and security of our platform. Our development pipeline is set and you can expect new products and features to be released next year. All of which are important for us to continue to deliver growing benefits to our partners and end users.

We acknowledge the trust our customers place in us comply with their legal and contractual obligations. It's not something we take lightly and the whole team is committed to living up to this trust. It has been a great privilege to serve and we look forward to continuing to do so in 2019.