I’m sure they’ll have me back if this doesn’t work out”, I reassured myself as I packed away my Deloitte laptop for the final time… I was a Director in the Enterprise Applications practice at the time and had spent almost 15 years working for the firm.
I always wanted to work with technology and I joined Deloitte’s graduate scheme seeking a broad range of experience. I wasn’t disappointed. I implemented, assessed, optimised and audited applications for numerous clients across a range of industry sectors, including Lloyds Banking Group, The Cabinet Office, Vodafone, HM Treasury and HSBC to name a few.
I loved consulting and look back with fond memories of the brilliant people, clients and teams that I worked with. I could easily have spent my entire career with Deloitte, which ironically, was the reason I left. I didn’t want to look back after a 40-year career and wonder what opportunities I had missed by staying with the same company.
I joined Bravura for several reasons. Firstly, it’s a really unique organisation. We are a fintech with an exciting growth trajectory, but we are also trusted by a blue-chip client base to process financial transactions worth trillions of dollars a month. That’s a really powerful combination.
The role at Bravura also offered a fabulous opportunity to engage with customers in a fascinating market segment. There is so much activity in the wealth sector, driven by legislative and regulatory change, demographic shifts, market consolidation and a whole range of other factors.
Oh yes… I also liked the idea of spending more evenings at home with my wife and two young children. As much as I used to enjoy the consulting lifestyle (eating room service whilst hunched over my laptop), I do, on balance, prefer spending time at home!
Anyway, enough about me, here are a few observations about trends I’ve seen since joining Bravura just over three years ago.
Cloud – The attitude towards holding data on the public cloud has completely changed. I asked about Bravura’s cloud strategy in my initial interview and was gently informed at the time that “the market isn’t quite ready to put customer data in the cloud”. It certainly is now… We run cloud-based managed services for a wide range of clients in the UK and overseas. We are in active discussion with most of our clients about how we can support them on the journey to the cloud.
Eco-systems – We are seeing clients broadening the capability of their platforms by adding additional components, such as sophisticated capital gains calculators and data management tools. These tools are sometimes referred to as microservices and support the concept of a platform being comprised of an eco-system of different components.
Automation – Many of our Sonata clients are now focusing attention to operational efficiency and a desire to streamline processes, increase automation and achieve straight-through processing. This can be achieved through smarter configuration, using our workflow engine and by implementing emerging automation technologies.
One such new technology is called Stanza. This is our new machine learning tool that reads incoming emails and assigns them to the correct workflow queue without the need for human intervention.
As the wealth management tech landscape continues to quickly evolve and change, I believe that cloud, eco-systems and automation are some of the key areas that will be leading the transformation of our industry in the coming years.
There are countless more changes bubbling away that will surface in the future. I look forward to working in partnership with my colleagues and clients as we grasp these opportunities as they arise.
About the author
More Insights
