Idea 11 digitally transforms rental bond management in Queensland
About RTA:
The Residential Tenancies Authority (RTA) is the Queensland Government statutory authority that administers the Residential Tenancies and Rooming Accommodation Act 2008.
The RTA is committed to optimising its services and has a renewed focus on delivering better customer experiences for Queensland’s renting community.
Overview
The Residential Tenancies Authority (RTA) is the Queensland Government statutory authority that administers the Residential Tenancies and Rooming Accommodation Act 2008.
With more than one-third of households in Queensland currently renting – and that number on the rise – the RTA is committed to optimising its services and has a renewed focus on delivering better customer experiences for Queensland’s renting community.
In 2018, the RTA engaged Idea 11 as its strategic technology partner to drive its digital transformation. One of the critical objectives of the partnership was to develop a next-gen, scalable and secure online forms solution to drive digitisation of essential bond management forms, and to accelerate the RTA’s journey from a paper-based organisation to a digital business.
Challenges
The RTA has traditionally relied heavily on paper forms and manual processes to perform its roles and responsibilities. Bond management is a key part of this, with several paper-based forms used to manage bond processes between tenants and property managers/owners.
The opportunity to digitise was huge - with the RTA receiving thousands of paper forms for bond lodgements, bond refunds, change of bond contributors, update your details and dispute resolution requests each week, via post and email. Prior to the launch of Web Services, RTA staff would enter the information from each of these forms into their systems manually.
"As our digital partner, Idea 11 provided the technical skills and experience in .NET and AWS that were needed for the successful implementation of the project. Idea 11 not only created the front-end digital form services platform, but also worked closely with RTA’s business leads to achieve automation throughout the CRM processing steps. "
- Nasa Walton,
Chief Digital Officer, Residential Tenancies Authority
The Solution
It was clear from the beginning that a successful outcome would depend on strong collaboration between Idea 11’s specialist development teams and the RTA’s own in-house experts.
By establishing a multidisciplinary team, consisting of experts from both organisations, Idea 11 was able to dive into the intricate business operations which power the RTA’s internal systems and manual processes. The Idea 11 team captured an in-depth understanding of the way the RTA functioned, how business processes tied together, and how they would be impacted by digitisation.
With a thorough understanding of the RTA’s needs and opportunities to improve, Idea 11’s experts designed a bespoke technology solution, purpose-built for the RTA. The objective was to design a future-ready platform capable of securely processing thousands of requests every week into the RTA’s custom CRM operating system.
To design a solution with sufficient scale and flexibility for the future, Idea 11 chose AWS as the backbone of RTA Web Services. AWS’s market-leading cloud technologies offered the diverse technological capabilities that would underpin the solution and ensure its success.
A customer-focused and accessible user experience was built using React with .NET Core, leveraging serverless technology in AWS. This enables the solution to automatically scale to meet demand, while simultaneously minimising ongoing costs. Idea 11’s team also developed a custom integration layer to provide business logic processing and interoperability with the RTA’s core CRM system that powers the organisation.
The solution leverages several AWS fully managed services to strike a balance between security, cost and complexity. The public facing service uses serverless technology (CloudFront, S3, API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB) to reduce costs and increase elasticity and fault tolerance. The solution integrates with the existing on-premises core systems via private network connectivity, using AWS Direct Connect and through a private API layer (Integration API).
Idea 11 used a modern DevOps framework for the deployment of the solution, including best-practice architecture standards, infrastructure-as-code, and continuous improvement and development pipelines to ensure that the RTA’s new online forms solution would be both scalable and extensible into the future.
"At the RTA, we listen to our customers and strive to make it easier to do business with us. Since mid-2019, we’ve seen a steady and consistent uptake of RTA Web Services, which have given customers access to a suite of smart digital services that are valued by the sector and our staff.”
- Jennifer Smith, Chief Executive Officer, Residential Tenancies Authority
Outcomes and benefits
Web Services allow customers to process their essential RTA transactions anywhere, anytime, with 24/7 self-service access. They offer a faster and easier alternative to RTA paper forms. For example, if all parties agree to a bond refund, they can take advantage of the Bond Refund Web Service’s fast track option, and see their bond refunded within hours.
To protect customers’ privacy and security, RTA Web Services were built to seamlessly integrate with the Queensland Government’s digital identity verification platform, QGov.
Since 2018, Idea 11 and the RTA have partnered to deliver five Web Services for the Queensland residential rental sector for bond lodgements, update your details, bond refunds, change of bond contributors and COVID-19 tenancy disputes.
Customer uptake of RTA Web Services has been strong. As of November 2020, over 45% of bonds lodged, 70% of bond refunds requested, 50% of customer details updated and 40% of change of bond contribute requests made have been completed via RTA Web Services.
The RTA and Idea 11 will continue to collaborate to introduce more Web Services to make renting in Queensland easier for everyone.
About Idea 11:
Idea 11 is an award-winning, full-stack AWS IT company that specialises in digital transformations, cloud infrastructure, software development and managed services.
We're recognised for our fresh approach to being a technology partner. We help our customers solve the challenges of today, envision their future and make it real. Our strong values, personal client relationships and long-term thinking makes us unique.
