Rowanmoor Pensions took over James Hay Consultancy, the self-administered scheme (SSAS) administration and associated consultancy business of self-administered pension specialist, James Hay on 31 August 2006.  Rowanmoor Pensions is the UK’s largest independent provider of SSAS and administers around 4,300 schemes including the SSAS portfolios of some of the UK’s major life offices, from administration centres in Salisbury and Bolton.  Rowanmoor Pensions currently employs around 200 staff.

The Challenge

Following an MBO from the parent group, Abbey, Rowanmoor Pensions had a window of 6 months to move its data and IT infrastructure from within the Abbey group. Director David Seaton had the arduous task of investigating the best possible IT solution to meet his company’s needs. During his research, it became clearly apparent that establishing his own IT department was not only cost prohibitive, it was time prohibitive as well. To buy, support and maintain the same environment that had previously been supplied would have been over £500,000 a year and would take a minimum of 12 months to implement.

The other challenge was that the way the data had been stored on the parent company’s IT infrastructure meant that there were many man hours required to identify and then migrate the data to a new system. Due to stringent FSA regulations, Rowanmoor Pensions had to prove that it could migrate and maintain client data in a secure and compliant managed environment.

Time was not a luxury that Mr Seaton had and due to this constraint he decided to look at the possibility of outsourcing his complete IT infrastructure. He had been recommended to Intercept by Delta Financial Systems the SSAS Independent Software Vendor.

The Solution

After an initial meeting with Intercept, it was apparent that their OnlineDesktop solution met every need Rowanmoor Pensions had, both from a business benefit, user and FSA compliance point of view.

“When looking at IT, our priorities were:

• Security of data
• Efficient disaster recovery
• Security of systems from hackers, viruses etc.
• Up to date platforms on which our systems could run
• Management of our IT system
• More efficient remote access and
• Fewer issues with laptops

"We were impressed with Intercept’s systems and we believed that they were a business who we could work with, we approached a number of their clients and were given excellent references,” said Mr David Seaton. The first steps were to pilot a small network to run Rowanmoor Pensions financial accounting system and this was conducted over a 3G card, with the results delivering exactly what Rowanmoor Pensions required. In November 2006 Intercept worked throughout the last weekend to migrate the data from the parent IT infrastructure and consequently by noon on the Monday all staff were accessing their Applications and Data on the new system without problems.

“The service we received from Intercept was second to none. Since going live, the change is remarkable; the help desk is friendly, fast and efficient; the systems can be accessed when and how you want to and we have virtually stopped using laptops, except for PowerPoint presentations.” Intercept is provisioning Microsoft Office, Outlook and a number of other line of business applications such as SSAS Pro, for Rowanmoor Pensions. Business benefits include:

• Immediate availability of latest releases of software without the need to upgrade hardware.
• Per user/per month pricing enables budgetary control.
• Inherent built in Business Continuity.
• Free help desk support.
• In built software asset management (SAM).

Next Steps

Having seen the benefits of hosted data, Rowanmoor Pensions will be introducing the new offering from Intercept, OnlineOffice early in Q1 2007. OnlineVoice is the integration of IP telephony and their applications. “From tests already conducted, we expect the rollout to be as uneventful as our IT System,” said Mr David Seaton, “Our estimates for the phone system look as if we will save at least 25% on running costs of a conventional system.”

Rowanmoor Pensions case study (53K)

Website: www.rowanmoor.co.uk