Punter Southall Keeps One Step Ahead with SkyDox

The business was originally set up to introduce a fresh, competitive presence to a largely static pension services market and primarily to put client service first. It has since been at the forefront of adopting bleeding-edge technology in order to deliver award-winning services while helping improve operational efficiencies.

The Challenge

The Punter Southall Group encourages an entrepreneurial and innovative approach within its broad range of businesses. This ability to move fast and to offer secure IT services centrally to its portfolio of companies across its international footprint has enabled the Group to grow rapidly and over the past 20 years establish itself as a major player within markets as diverse as actuarial consulting, pension fund administration, wealth management, and financial advice. Operating in a regulated and information-orientated industry, the provision of a platform that could provide enterprise-class data security was extremely important, as was the ability to protect intellectual property.

The Solution

Over the past two years the Group has carried out a complete technology upgrade, including building a new data center and virtual computing environment – and undergoing a desktop hardware and software refresh. In this process IT Services identified a requirement for file sharing and collaboration and recognized in SkyDox a unique ability to instantly create collaborative groups to focus on new opportunities. Given the fluid and dynamic nature of the Group’s business, the membership of these groups is constantly changing, rendering conventional document management solutions insufficiently agile to meet this need. IT Services has been piloting the use of SkyDox within their own team and, following a successful trial, plan to extend SkyDox to all parts of the business during 2012.

The Group’s technology improvements are laying the groundwork upon which it can continue to expand rapidly and introduce new products and services for its customers. In its next phase of development, the IT Services department plans to further extend solutions that will underpin and support the continued rapid growth of the business. In addition to SkyDox, tools already deployed include Microsoft’s SharePoint and CRM Dynamics, and IBM’s FileNet. John Rogers, IT Director at Punter Southall Group comments,

“We are impressed with the way in which SkyDox has been designed to work the same way people do, supporting their ability to work together and share documents, while retaining important controls over security and confidentiality. It offers a tremendous opportunity within the Group because of its ability to support an entrepreneurial and creative approach to business.”