I'm Vedran Babic, Chief Executive Officer at MMC. We're an investment administration business providing a range of investment administration services to around 100 clients in New Zealand. Ranging from fund managers, product providers, KiwiSaver schemes as well as advisory groups. Today, MMC administers over 85 billion in funds on behalf of our clients. It's really, really critical for MMC, to maintain operating on a daily basis. The services we provide on behalf of our clients are essentially core infrastructure services, along with administration so we are the operational backbone for our clients and they rely on us daily. Some of the major challenges that we had was really a need to mobilise our workforce, essentially overnight, even though we are regarded as an essential service we made a call early on to prioritise the safety of our people. And as such, we needed to mobilise the entire workforce overnight and ensure that everybody was setup to not only work from home but be productive.

Thankfully the lockdown didn't pose us any real challenges. Having that trust in that our day-to-day operations and systems run really smoothly during lockdown and working from home. It meant that we could focus on providing a great level of service that we would normally provide to clients if we'd been in the office and meeting in person. Relationships are incredibly important to our business and looking at what we've gone through, whilst nothing can beat face to face and meeting in person, it has strengthened a lot of our relationships and it's in a number of ways. You know, we've held roadshows and workshops virtually which has been great, and that's helped us get in front of clients probably a little bit more often than we normally would, but also to connect with people that aren't necessarily right in the Auckland region by being able to reach out to them as well.

Good old COVID-19 had put a lot of stress and pressure on all industry players, I'm sure. And very much so when markets were so volatile. It was really important that MMC delivered continuity around our unit pricing and they did keep us up to date on a very regular basis, which was so welcomed in respect of the clients that we were talking to and making sure that our information and data was accurate.

The service that MMC provides to us is absolutely crucial. We need an ally, a trusted ally, who can provide us with the type of service, the seamless integration and also help us provide that reliable information and reporting to our clients, quickly, seamlessly and be available to us when we need them.

So MMC is a core infrastructure provider and an essential service, so being 100% online is very much, it's the pinnacle of what they're trying to provide to their customers. In doing so, it's very much about working through and working out which parts of their infrastructure needs to be up all of the time. How can we have all of their people productive and delivering the services that they require. It's really allowed us to have a look at how we can use the latest technology from Microsoft, such as Microsoft 365 and Teams to collaborate around working from anywhere to really enable them to be productive, no matter where they're working from.

So Lancom have been instrumental to our success over the last few years.They are one of our most integral partners. We consider Lancom to be an extension of MMC, and we rely on them daily to deliver our services and continue to support our staff and enable them to work. The buzz word these days is agility and being able to pivot on a dime and I think technology does enable that if you've got the right technology stack and the right team and partners supporting you. So again for us, we were able to make decisions without really having to worry about technology being a constraint and that made it really easy to not only make the right decisions but ensure that we executed on those decisions successfully, not just for our business, but more importantly for our clients.