Delivering Next Level Financial Assurance in Government

In any industry, things can go wrong. In the mining industry, things can go wrong with major impacts.

Mining companies have environmental management and rehabilitation obligations to obviate accidents, and governments seek surety from them to ensure that they have funds available to meet those obligations. This surety is usually provided in the form of cash held in deposits or bank guarantees made against miners’ assets.

For mining companies, this means cash or assets are tied up in sureties when they could be better invested elsewhere, and for governments, this means less ability to spread the financial risk, since surety is held individually against each mine.

The Scheme’s management turned to Roboyo to deliver a world-class solution to help manage this complex arrangement between the Financial Provisioning Scheme, the Department of Environment and Science (DES), the Department of Resources, and the mining companies.

Roboyo adopted an agile approach and the Appian low-code platform to deliver a problem-solving application on time (before the Mineral and Energy Resources Act came into effect in April 2019).

Aptly named FAIR (Financial Assurance Information Registry), the application was specifically designed to reduce the average time taken to complete risk assessments.

Technical integration was a key component of the programme, involving a full digitized financial assessment process undertaken by Roboyo. The integration between people was critical and required Roboyo to facilitate workshops and other activities to promote cross-department collaboration across both business and technical teams.

These activities were essential to the success of the project due to its complexity, particularly its financial complexity. Allocations, reconciliation, invoice and payment matching, pool contributions and surety or fee payments all had to be catered for – surety can be transferred between miners, which means that payments must be reallocated, refunded, or repaid and miners can amalgamate or de-amalgamate. In summary myriad different scenarios needed to be recognized via the Roboyo workshops and catered for in the resulting application.

Roboyo delivered the FAIR application on time and on budget ready for the scheme’s launch in April 2019.

We have provided the Queensland government with a comprehensive picture of its exposure to risk in this part of the industry, with improved productivity, streamlined business processes and cross- departmental collaboration.

A further aspect of Roboyo’s contribution to the scheme was release management and post implementation support, provided via Services offering. The ongoing nature of the services delivered by Roboyo are highly regarded by the scheme stakeholders.

For example, mid-way through the project, Roboyo developed a future-proofed generic solution to replace a more hard-coded design, to the advantage of the scheme. And with ongoing Pulse services, Roboyo continued to support the program throughout the COVID pandemic.