Development of the Secretariat's Debt Management System - Meridian As part of the debt management capacity building programme
delivered by the Secretariat, the Debt Management Unit (DMU) develops and maintains the Secretariat's debt recording and management system. This software, first released on a modest scale in 1985, has grown over the years into an advanced system featuring a wide array of functions and a rich set of reports  allowing countries to comprehensively record, monitor and generate information on the debt situation for use by both local entities as well as international institutions.

The software is regularly maintained and enhanced to address
the technological gap in the system, emergence of new debt
management techniques, adoption of sound debt management
practices, new global debt initiatives, availability of more complex financing products, need for closer compliance with modern accounting principles and international recording and reporting standards and increasing expectations of member countries for the software to embrace state-of-the-art technologies.

In May 2012, the board of governors approved a budget of £3.4 million to be sourced from CFTC funds for the purposes of developing and implementing a new Secretariat debt management system (now known as Commonwealth Meridian). Further to the Board's decision, the Secretariat decided to outsource the development of the system and awarded a contract to Infosys Ltd (India based company) to redesign and develop the next state of the art debt management system to better support member countries. A fixed cost price contract was subsequently signed in September 2015. The contract was for a period of three (3) years originally planned to end August 2018 but later extended and completed in January 2019. The project period included a warranty period of one year.

Commonwealth Meridian is designed to effectively support modern debt management offices and includes a comprehensive set of debt management functions covering loan management, securities management, contingent liabilities management, lending management, grants management, financial derivatives, liability management operations, sub-national debt management, private sector external debt management, portfolio analysis and comprehensive reports based on internationally recognised standards. 

After a successful User Acceptance Testing and a Warranty period, during which the Commonwealth Meridian was piloted in 11 countries, the system is now available for live implementation in all member countries that use the Secretariat's debt management system. 

Implementation of Commonwealth Meridian in member states will be done in phases to efficiently manage the demand and expectations from member countries. The first phase (2019/20) will see the implementation of Commonwealth Meridian in the countries that took part in the pilot implementation stage and a few other priority countries. In total, the first phase will cover 17 countries from which 10 countries will be targeted to fully adopt Commonwealth Meridian at the end of the 2019/20 financial year.

In line with the 2019/20 delivery plan, the project aims to have 10 member countries fully adopting Commonwealth Meridian at the end of 2019/20 financial year and 25 member countries at the end of the 20/21 financial year.

In addition to Commonwealth Meridian implementation in the 17 countries, the project will undertake comprehensive capacity building activities to build a team of Commonwealth Meridian experts to complement the DMU team. This team of experts will be key to the implementation of Commonwealth Meridian in member states.

DMU has made a commitment to support CS-DRMS for the next three(3) years from 2019/20 finical year. DMU intends to implement Commonwealth Meridian in all the countries by June 2022 and phase out CS-DRMS.