About Meridian
Introducing Commonwealth Meridian
In recent years, the public debt management arena has undergone significant transformation and development including stronger emphasis on medium-term debt management strategy development, increasing awareness of risk management, growing importance of the management of contingent liabilities, new reporting standards and the need for improved transparency.
Given these changes in public debt management, as well as significant advancement in technology, the Commonwealth Secretariat’s Debt Management Unit embarked on a project to develop a new public debt management system, Commonwealth Meridian, that incorporates advanced and improved functionalities to address emerging debt management requirements and takes advantage of the latest state-of-the-art technologies.
About Commonwealth Meridian
Commonwealth Meridian is a comprehensive solution that promotes effective and pro-active public debt management. It offers the following functions and features:
- Public and publicly guaranteed debt, lending portfolios and private sector external debt can be recorded, managed and analysed;
- Customisable deployment of the solution in centralised, de-centralised and hybrid environments defined by member countries’ IT and institutional infrastructure;
- Configurable around the delivery to key stakeholders, e.g. Ministry of Finance, Debt Management Office, Central Bank, various funding agencies and project implementing agencies, thus streamlining the information flow between the various entities;
- The ability to model any workflow arrangement and/or institutional structure for debt management;
- Provides flexibility in adding and maintaining a wide range of financing products including any future financing products through the use of instrument templates;
- Organised around a central repository of data from which key stakeholders can access information to ensure that real time data is always available even to remote offices;
- Driven by alerts and notifications, integrated with mail exchange systems to support the business workflow process;
- Fosters accountability and transparency through data driven work flow; and
- Integrates with external systems to provide straight-through processing and accurate data to stakeholders.
Meridian has undergone various forms of rigorous testing, including by the software development partner, the Secretariat’s debt management unit, user acceptance testing by 16 debt management experts from various countries and organisations across the Commonwealth, and through a pilot programme lasting one year with 10 participating countries.
The diagram below shows a main screen, listing the different modules that are available in Meridian.
What is new in Commonwealth Meridian?
Preparing for Commonwealth Meridian
Meridian will cater for both SQL and Oracle sites. However, the new system is web-based and may require hardware and system software that your organisation may not have. The specifications are available for review at the top of this page or by reading the Meridian technical requirements document.
The Secretariat will provide a Migration Tool to assist countries to move from CS-DRMS to Meridian. However, migration is conditional on countries upgrading to at least CS-DRMS Version 2.2.
Countries must ensure that the quality of CS-DRMS data is at the required level for migration to Meridian. Guidance notes on preparing for migration will be provided to assist countries.
Member countries will be required to sign a new license agreement for Commonwealth Meridian, which also has a new fee structure. A signed license agreement is a pre-requisite for the implementation of Commonwealth Meridian.
When is Commonwealth Meridian available?
The Commonwealth Secretariat is pleased to announce that after a successful pilot programme, Meridian will be available from July 2019. Interested member countries should contact the Secretariat on the following email [email protected]
Continued support for CS-DRMS
The Secretariat will continue to support CS-DRMS for a limited number of years after Meridian has been released. However, no new features will be introduced and only critical bugs will be fixed during this time. Existing users will be strongly encouraged to migrate to Meridian.
Contact Us
If you have any questions, you can contact us at [email protected]. More information on Meridian will be made available on this website shortly.