Innovation: Keeping speed with change
30 November 2017
Custodian and administrator Multrees Investor Services is collaborating with academia to ensure clients are getting everyday innovative solutions to ever increasing challenges.
Wealth management faces enormous challenges in helping clients grow against a backdrop of technological development, new markets and increasing regulatory change. Dedication to clients’ growth is one thing, but to continually do this means being rigorous about exploring new ways of working on an on-going basis. That’s where good outsourcing partners earn their crust.
Multrees is partnering with the University of Surrey’s Centre for the Digital Economy (CoDE) to solve everyday problems for clients in the wealth management sector. Clive Stelfox, COO says "On the one hand we must engage in the wider strategic innovation within the industry, engaging with emerging technologies such as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) but on the other hand we need to be agile in helping our clients solve the everyday problems that they face now."
Clive says the collaboration with CoDE has given Multrees the perspective and skills to devise and deliver change at pace, and offer solutions to many of the challenges clients are facing. He adds “The success of any initiative is about whether it delivers a benefit. Since working with CoDE we have seen a big uptick in both the range of change we are able to deliver for our clients, and the speed at which we do it.”
Jaco Cebula, CTO at Multrees, explains the collaborations with CoDE puts Multrees at the forefront of innovation. “The cutting edge work we are exposed to with CoDE allows us to think beyond the immediate future and consider the longer term. It’s about giving people scope to work in a structured manner on proof of concept technologies, generating as many ideas as possible and quickly assessing which are viable and which aren’t.”
“Multrees applies agile practices to explore innovations in business models by proposing service value propositions that exploit new digital technologies,” explains Dave Griffin, a member of CoDE's research team. “This practice takes good ideas and converts them into minimum viable products that can be delivered effectively to market at speed — rather than being bogged down in over engineering a solution. And because it’s agile and constantly assessed, lessons can quickly be applied to ensure it delivers maximum value to clients. To optimise digital opportunity, we are finding this way of working to be more vital now than ever before.”