Request for Information – Payments and Finance Transformation

⁠⁠⁠RNSW is exploring the option to implement a cloud-native, evergreen commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) financial management solution.

Project goals

1. To determine what cloud-native, evergreen COTS financial management systems exist that can meet the requirements with minimal customisation.
2. To help inform budget and determine affordability.

Scope:

About Revenue

Revenue NSW (RNSW) is the State’s principal revenue management agency and is part of the Department of Customer Service (DCS). Our vision is to be the world’s most innovative and customer-centric revenue agency contributing to a fairer, safer and stronger New South Wales. Our purpose is to administer grants, resolve fines and collect revenue to fund essential State services for the people of NSW in a fair, efficient, and timely manner. Our values are integrity, trust, service and accountability.

RNSW is made up of five divisions and approximately 2000 employees. We are geographically dispersed across 5 locations, these include Parramatta, Gosford, Wollongong, Maitland and Lithgow. The RNSW Aspire 2032 Strategy sets out how our organisation is working to be the world’s most innovative and customer-centric revenue agency over the next 10 years to June 2032.

Current State

The current line of business system in the NSW Taxes & Grants landscape is MARS. MARS is an inhouse, bespoke monolithic application built on Java with much of business logic in Oracle DB as stored procedure or DB triggers. MARS underpins the assessment, finance, customer management and case management capability and is critical to RNSW ability to collect and properly account for Taxes. 

MARS currently manages 53 NSW revenue types. Each of these revenue types is driven by NSW legislation that defines how much and from whom the money is to be collected.

To achieve this mandate, MARS relies on multiple other systems, both within wider DCS cluster or 3rd party systems for specific capabilities.

Problem Statement

Over time, MARS has expanded with multiple new features and products that were designed in isolation, and not aligned with existing capabilities, leading to the following challenges:

1. Legacy technology and tech debt.

2. Data quality and integration friction.

3. Reconciliation and financial control gaps.

4. Reporting and analytics limitations.

5. Process and operational efficiency.

6. Compliance & audit risks.

Some of the foundational building blocks of our digital strategy is to establish separated finance, payments and debt domains, which reside in MARS. As such, RNSW is exploring the option to implement a cloud-native, evergreen commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) financial management solution, that achieves business outcomes through standard configuration rather than custom development.

Customisation of core COTS functionality should be minimised to reduce upgrade complexity, operational risk, and whole-of-life cost. Where gaps exist between current MARS-based processes and standard COTS capability, process standardisation and organisational change will be considered rather than solution customisation, where feasible.

Purpose

This Request for Information (RFI) is an information gathering process to collect information and opinions from the market. This RFI and the responses provided may be used a precursor to a procurement process.

Primary contact:

Julia Brown

julia.brown@revenue.nsw.gov.au