Anchor Capital and LanDynamix have joined forces to drive a strategic technology transformation that supports operational excellence, security and client satisfaction in the highly regulated wealth and asset management sector. Lynne Trivella, Chief Technology Officer at Anchor, tells us how the company’s rapid growth and global ambitions required a tailored IT solution to enhance efficiency, ensure compliance and maintain its strong reputation.
Anchor Capital is a highly successful South African founded and based entrepreneurial wealth and asset management group. The company focuses on personable, authentic client relationships and a world-class investment process.
Anchor Capital offers a broad range of local and global investment solutions to individuals, financial advisers and institutions. Anchor Capital is the largest privately owned independent wealth management group in SA with offices around the world as well as global investment licences.
In November 2023 Anchor Capital embarked on a new chapter as it merged with UK-based wealth manager Credo. The newly formed R230 billion group is now one of the biggest wealth and asset managers in SA. This strategic merger marked a significant step in Anchor’s on-going commitment to provide clients with the best possible investment opportunities and services.
The new global holding company owns 100% of Anchor and Credo and this development expands its global presence and reach. The combined group will position approximately two-thirds of its assets in global markets.
Lynne Trivella, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Anchor, explained the company began its journey to this milestone only 12 years ago.
“We view our clients as global investment citizens while maintaining a boutique/personal touch approach to relations. This ethos strengthens our ability to service clients’ investment and growth goals on a global scale,” said Trivella.
“Credo has a very similar culture and level of personal service, so the two organisations are an excellent fit for each other. Critical mass is also increasingly important in our industry and the resultant size of our group enables us to invest further in crucial technology upgrades and global investment resources while at the same time meeting the increasingly stringent demands of the regulators.”
Anchor Capital’s business challenge – The business case for technology enablement.
Trivella was presented with high level tasks that included:
- Improving the end-user technology experience to drive greater productivity output from what the company considers its greatest asset – its people are ‘A type’ personality employees bent on achievement.
- Acquiring the necessary technology solutions for secure operations and the protection of the highly sensitive data they hold – personal identifiable information (PII) to allow the company to maintain its high reputational status into the future.
- Ensuring on-going compliance with legislative dictates.
The CTO approached LanDynamix to assist with these goals.
Why LanDynamix
LanDynamix enables customers to seamlessly utilise appropriate technology for competitive advantage by leveraging its unique value proposition, technology risk and return on investment (ROI) framework. LanDynamix works with clients to acquire a profound understanding of their business; their requirements; goals and hurdles. LanDynamix designs solutions for customers by bringing the full power of its extensive technical expertise to bear on the situation.
LanDynamix currently services over 150 customers with its unique fully or co-managed IT offering. With securely managed IT operations geared to enable a seamless technology experience, LanDynamix customers are positioned for growth and can take their businesses to the next level of value creation.
Ethan Searle, LanDynamix Business Development Director, said: “These tools guarantee the success of our customers. We know through the years of successful customer deployments and the depth of expertise and technical IP in our business that this is only achievable through working optimally with the right technology.”
Anchor Capital’s needs
- Compliance and security.
All these requirements were compounded by both compliance and security concerns with users sharing sensitive information with Anchor in the form of IDs and stock and investment portfolios, to name just two.
A system breach would present huge reputation issues for any company operating in the investment sector. Essentially, Anchor is not a transactional business – if a system is down the company can continue to function. What is more important, from a technical standpoint, is enabling Anchor to operate super efficiently and securely while providing the right experience for a very small and niche target market.
- Wi-Fi upgrade.
The CTO also highlighted improved and secure Wi-Fi as a key component of staff motivation as well as being pivotal to delivering the best and most consistent customer experience possible. The latter is essential for enhanced reputation and market recommendations.
The Anchor Capital solution: LanDynamix designed a bespoke solution for Anchor’s needs.
The solution included co-managed IT services and Security Operations Centre (SOC) with LanDynamix taking over the high-level security function. Considerations in this function include:
- Security best practice implemented, including documented processes; procedures; people; technology; encryption and reporting.
Business benefits to Anchor’s customers
Security operations centre (SOC) software was deployed on end-users PCs and integrated into MS Office 365 which builds a fingerprint of how the users interacts with their technology and creates alerts on anomalies, mitigates issues, resolves them and provides a detailed incident report for compliance.
For example, if a user who normally works out of the Johannesburg office between 9am and 5pm all of a sudden tries to ‘log into their account’ from Russia at 2am it would detect this anomaly and block any action from happening.
Searle said MS 365 Office is Anchor’s main productivity tool.
“We migrated their 365 Office to LanDynamix and we support and manage all those functions. Moreover, we implemented proactive management of their endpoints and network security,” he said.
The result for Anchor Capital.
End-users reported the solution had changed their lives.
“The impact of the upgraded Wi-Fi system was immense,” said Searle. He confirms LanDynamix is busy rolling out phase two of the Anchor Capital project with upgraded compute capacity primarily positioned to ensure top class staff can operate optimally and the best total cost of ownership.
“Our goal is to unleash the value in technology and deliver it to our customers. We aim to devise solutions designed to ensure our customers can fulfil their competitive advantage seamlessly and at scale. This can only be achieved through the depth of our understanding of their business operations,” added Searle.
