Richard Large, Chief Technology Officer

The Future Fund has a clear high-level vision of technology, data and analytics working in harmony to support investment decisions and corporate decision making.

The role of Chief Technology Officer was created in 2018 to lead the efforts to bring this vision to life.

Improvements in technology are disrupting traditional investment models by creating new opportunities to generate returns and monitor and manage risk.

As Australia’s sovereign wealth fund investing over $198 billion on behalf of future generations of Australians, we need to keep up with advances in technology and harness the opportunities they offer so we can be the most effective investor we can.

We need to determine how we can deploy the latest innovations and emerging technologies to the benefit of the performance of the funds we manage and seek to give our organisation a strategic and competitive advantage.

Recent efforts have focused on providing us with solid foundations in the key areas of data sourcing, management and consumption alongside upgrading our infrastructure and refreshing our workplace technology.

Building on these strong foundations, we have embarked on a comprehensive review of our technology and data strategy which will provide the roadmap for the next three to five years.

We are undertaking extensive research as we explore the art of the possible.

The exercise is designed to ensure the organisation makes the right strategic decisions in relation to technology and also inspire and excite the broader business as we develop and implement our plans.

It is a highly collaborative approach designed to engage teams right across the business so that we can jointly define our future state and how we get there.

We will consider how we can employ artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to improve our investment process and to generate even greater insight into our portfolio.

We will look for ways to use technology to make knowledge sharing within our organisation more efficient and enable teams from right across the business to collaborate better.

We will also explore ways to improve how we work and organise ourselves. The Future Fund operates an outsourced model so we have a great opportunity to work alongside our partners to drive innovation in our processes.

There is a lot to do and we are all excited about the challenge.

We look forward to reporting back on our progress next year.