User:Schwede66/Talent2

Talent2 is an Australian-owned human resources business process outsourcing company, headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, operating in the Asia-Pacific region. The company was founded in 2003 by Australian businessmen Geoff Morgan and Andrew Banks.

Talent2 background
Talent2 was started by two Australian entrepreneurs, Andrew Banks and Geoff Morgan. Banks and Morgan founded the Australian recruitment company Morgan and Banks in 1985. In 1994 the company was listed on the Australian stock exchange and sold four years later for $470 million.

Banks and Morgan launched Talent2 in 2003 focussing on recruitment and payroll management. The company grew rapidly and soon had 1700 staff in 19 countries and a turnover of more than $300 million a year. It claimed to have 2400 clients in the Asia Pacific region with more than 740,000 employees whose pay was managed by the company.

The chief executive of Talent2 is John Rawlinson, a former physical education teacher. He has been at the head of the company from its incorporation.

In 2007, Talent2 was valued on the Australian stock exchange at $425 million. Both Banks and Morgan featured on Australia's BRW Rich List with personal wealth estimated at $387 million. Following the global financial crisis, the share price dropped 67% from A$1.53 to 32c. In response, Banks and Morgan bought back shares from investors who wanted to sell out and delisted the company off the Australian Stock Exchange; they kept the company afloat by partnering with United States recruiting company Allegis thereby avoiding the need to go to the market for new investment money.

New Zealand Post
Talent2 was awarded the New Zealand Post contract in 2010 to create a centralised payroll programme to replace the existing regional system. After it went live in 2011, thousands of NZ Post workers were under-paid or over-paid. EPMU national industry organiser Joe Gallagher described the new NZ Post payroll as a "dog" of a system and said: "We had workers overpaid, underpaid, not paid, you name it, we had it. We had instances where people got significantly large amounts and occasions where they were paid minus amounts." He said he was aware of team leaders "paying for their employees' groceries and petrol to cover pay problems, while others had faced the possibility of mortgage defaults." Given NZ Post's problems with Talent2, Mr Gallagher wondered why the company was awarded another Government contract. In fact, contract negotiations with the Ministry of Education appear to have begun long before the contract with NZ Post was signed - although NZ Post went live first. NZ Post took Talent2 to task over the mistakes but the software had to be re-written and it took nearly two years before the system began to improve. Steven Joyce, who was subsequently tasked with sorting out problems with Novopay, said in January 2013 he was aware of NZ Post's payroll problems but could not yet comment on "the similarities or otherwise" between the two.

New Zealand Ministry of Education
In 2005, New Zealand Education Minister Trevor Mallard recommended that Talent2 be selected as the provider of the Ministry's payroll system, known as Novopay, which has been the subject of an ongoing controversy.