The world of wealth management is changing fast. Like other
spheres of business, it has had to come rapidly to terms with the
challenges of today's fast-changing legal and technological
environment. A new breed of young, wealthy and technology-literate
individuals now expect to do business on their mobile devices -
including managing their money. Meanwhile, a flood of new
compliance regulations governing the use and transmittal of
sensitive financial information means that wealth managers have had
to change with the times.
Third Financial is at the forefront of this evolution. The firm
has created a suite of software, known as tercero, which enables
wealth managers and private banks to deliver real-time investment
management, reporting, wealth CRM, compliance oversight and mobile
capabilities to their clients, delivered to the internet-connected
device of their choice.
Driven by its comprehensive tercero wealth management platform,
Third Financial has enjoyed spectacular growth in the four years
since its founding. As it grew, however, the company found itself
facing the same problem: potential clients loved the software and
the capabilities it offered, but many did not have the technical
ability, infrastructure or willingness to host it themselves.
"Our customers are experts in money management but tend not to be
particularly proficient in IT," explained Third Financial's CEO
Stewart Foster. "If they wanted to deploy the tercero suite they
used to have two choices: either host it on their own premises, or
put it into a dedicated hosted environment in a data centre. For
many of our customers, both options added another layer of expense
and management. Few of our clients want to spend time and money
buying licences or hardware, and then managing the resulting IT
issues. All of this distracts them from their core business of
managing their clients' money.
"The whole point of the tercero platform is that it provides
everything our clients need - reporting, compliance, customer
relations and portfolio management - in a single package. The
additional investment in hosting that many of our prospective
clients required, typically costing tens of thousands of pounds,
threatened to become an obstacle to our expansion," said
Foster.
Third Financial decided to find a technology partner that could
provide a secure and resilient hosting service for its application
suite, and that could enable it to deliver tercero as a
Cloud service, rather than one that the clients hosted and
managed themselves. After putting out a tender, the Third Financial
chose Claranet to deliver the hosting platform that would best
support its software, and its future success.
Claranet proposed that Third Financial migrate the tercero suite
onto its Managed Application Hosting platform. The service enables
organisations to place its software into one of Claranet's
enterprise-grade, Tier 3 data centres, where it is monitored and
managed by Claranet's expert staff to optimise application
performance and availability.
Third Financial migrated its software to Claranet's Managed
Application Hosting service, placing it in a secure,
fully-virtualised environment based on best-of-breed hosting
infrastructure. The service went live in December 2011. Claranet
takes responsibility for every aspect of the live application
environment, including the security of the data held within the
tercero applications - a crucial consideration for any financial
services firm or end user.
"Compliance is the big issue that wealth managers worry about,
especially when they entrust their data to a third party," said
Foster. "We need to be able to assure our clients that their
sensitive data would be safe with Claranet, for two important
reasons: so that they can reassure their own customers, and also to
satisfy compliance regulations from the Financial Services
Authority (FSA).
"A key criterion for choosing Claranet was that they are an
ISO:27001- and ISO:9000-accredited provider. What is more, our
service is based solely in UK data centres, which protects us from
the headache of data sovereignty issues.
"What this means for our customers is that they have the assurance
that their data is looked after by an organisation that takes
security and quality assurance seriously. In fact, the data is far
more secure than it would be if our clients hosted it on their
premises. The whole architecture of Claranet's Managed Application
Hosting is designed around security; this makes the service a much
easier sell to our clients, and also reassures the regulator," said
Foster.