Tulare County, California
Frank Vigario is Chief Investment Officer for Tulare County, California, the nation’s number one agricultural producing county in the country. Tulare County boasts a population of nearly 500,000 and is located in California’s Central Valley. He and a two-person staff had to manage the investment process, banking and other responsibilities of a $3-billion treasury pool using a system that did not accommodate a wide range of securities efficiently. It required painstaking manual input of every data point, as well as workarounds to get the system to match some securities. Inevitably, when errors were made, it was another painstaking and time-consuming process to fix them.
“It wasn’t easy to get the data out of the system to do any type of customization on the reporting,” Frank says. “And it wasn’t cloud based, so we couldn’t really work from home. We had to run through the county VPN to get connected and it took a lot more steps and was a lot slower process.”
Frank vetted different systems and “it was either one doesn’t do enough but is within our price range or it does more, but is way out of our price range,” he says. “MaxQ came into the fold as a new upstart system. It did what the more established system was doing at a much lower cost.”
The CIO says the contract was very simple and staff were “very professional and walked us through the process, step by step, all the way through our go live date. After we went live, they continued to work with us to make sure everything was going smooth and dealt with any issues super quick and in a very professional manner.”
Now that Tulare County is a subscriber, “I discover new stuff just about every day,” Frank says. “It’s like, oh, I didn’t know these reports are there or that a lot of reports we can customize for what management requests. I feel we’re still just scratching the surface. There are still some features in MaxQ we’re looking forward to, such as the cash optimization and the custom benchmarking, that are on our list of things to implement in the near future.”
The differences around the office are clear. “We have noticeable time savings and that’s allowed me and my staff to spend more time on actual investing. The checks and balances built into MaxQ have eliminated the errors. The staff is much happier and that just makes for a better working place for everybody.”