QIC invests in connection and visibility across its real estate portfolio
Australia-based investment firm maintains strong returns with an integrated financial planning environment
For three decades, QIC has invested for the long term while remaining nimble in the face of change. When QIC needed to provide emergency COVID relief to thousands of retail tenants, the planning and analytics team created a consistent, manageable process in Anaplan. They then built a half-dozen connected models and an Anaplan Center of Excellence to support key financial processes and provide instant, comprehensive financial information. Asset performance, scenario analysis capabilities, and decision-making have all improved.
With Anaplan we get visibility into all our data, and our leaders can see what’s happening across our portfolio in real time whenever they need to.Adam Rose, Head of Analytics Solutions, QIC
Six-plus
interconnected financial models support key business processes
30 seconds
to create new data views across $13.9 billion AUD real estate portfolio
Six weeks
to develop a bespoke Anaplan model to meet new large-scale requirement
QIC is a trusted investment manager and adviser providing risk-adjusted returns for the clients they serve. With more than $125 billion AUD in assets under management (as of December 31, 2024), they have grown into a leading specialist manager in infrastructure, real estate, private debt, private equity, natural capital, and liquid assets for about 115 institutional investors internationally.
With presence spanning across four continents and offices in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, London, San Francisco, New York, and Singapore, QIC is well-placed in large global markets. Its government ownership, global reach, deep sector expertise, and market insights equip QIC to seize opportunities and navigate uncertainty, striving to deliver resilient investment returns.
Responding to a sudden shift
When COVID-19 hit Australia, QIC also became responsible for distributing government- supported financial relief, called “concessions,” to over 5,000 tenants at the retail assets QIC owns and manages across Australia — a task that the planning and analytics team initially proposed managing with spreadsheets.
“Delivering concessions to our tenants during COVID was a huge and unprecedented task,” explains Adam Rose, Head of Analytics Solutions at QIC. “We basically needed a bespoke calculation for each tenant. During the first lockdown that would have run to 3,000 spreadsheets, which would have evolved into 6,000, which was just not going to cut it.”
Fortunately, QIC had begun a proof-of-concept (PoC) with Anaplan for portfolio consolidation before COVID hit. When lockdowns began, QIC shifted the PoC focus and quickly built a concessions model in Anaplan.
“In about six weeks we created a model that could run the calculations to help us direct pandemic- related relief to our tenants,” says Rose. “We were fortunate that we had been looking at Anaplan. It’s why we were able to mobilize so quickly.”
Establishing truly connected planning
QIC decommissioned the concessions model after COVID and began a broad-based Anaplan implementation that integrated data from Salesforce and databases across the organization.
Today, QIC’s connected Anaplan models include:
- Extended trade and outgoings, which calculates and distributes group costs for tenants in line with internal business rules and contractual agreements.
- Lease Expiry Profile, which calculates the weighted average expiry across the QIC Real Estate portfolio.
- Leasing cashflow, which calculates cashflow for all properties, accounting for partial years and other variables.
- Marketing forecasting, which calculates budgets that support tenant marketing activities over a fiscal year.
- Net operating income, which monitors key financial metrics at the general ledger level to provide accurate and up-to-date net operating income figures.
- Portfolio management, which tracks the performance of QIC’s portfolio across all asset types.
All models follow shared governance rules, and process improvements were built into the Anaplan solution. Data that’s used in multiple use cases resides in an Anaplan Data Hub, and flows easily from one model to another — for example, from leasing cashflow to extended trade and outgoings.
During the rollout, QIC established an Anaplan Center of Excellence (CoE). That team builds new models, consulting with partners as needed.
Gaining deeper insights
Planning and analysis with Anaplan gives QIC deeper visibility into asset and company performance. “Moving to Anaplan has enabled us to dig down into our data by setting up new data hierarchies,” explains Denis Asnicar, General Manager, Planning and Analytics at QIC. “We can connect information that we previously hadn’t connected to gain richer insights. For instance, we can now look at the lease expiry of groups of tenants over time, rather than as a whole.”
The planning and analytics team’s precision and efficiency are also improved. “Our portfolio management model is now far more accurate,” says Asnicar. “We no longer spend time consolidating data from various sources, which would take hours, but we can get a different view of our data in less than 30 seconds using Anaplan.”
Additionally, QIC’s business leaders get a much clearer view of company performance. “Working with multiple spreadsheets made it hard to get a view across the whole business,” Rose comments. “With Anaplan we get visibility into all our data, and our leaders can see what’s happening across our portfolio in real time whenever they need to.”
As a result, QIC is much better positioned to evolve and grow in the coming years. “We are now in a position to respond to the dynamic investor landscape,” explains Rose. “As investor requirements shift, we now have a platform that can adjust to their evolving requirements, whether they be large pooled funds, or smaller assets.”
