Ascot Lloyd
Ascot Lloyd has grown rapidly through acquisition to create one of the largest independently owned wealth management firms in the UK, with over 500 employees, 22,000 customers and £10 billion funds under management. Central to achieving the firm's strategic objectives in 2021 was establishing an industry-leading reporting platform that would allow them to ask new questions of their data in order to drive effective decision making.
Endjin's Azure Readiness Assessment reviewed the current state regarding the existing Azure environment, with resulting recommendations and actions performed with a wider, strategic perspective – setting out best practices for future growth and management of the cloud platform beyond the data warehouse (e.g. Landing Zone topology, security and identity – including least privilege access via Privileged Identity Management, policy and licensing and billing).
endjin were a key part of our journey. A big selling point was to choose a consultancy company who were small, niche, majored in data & analytics, and could both strategise and deliver. Endjin were the only ones who came to the table with Azure Synapse and a very cost-effective implementation of it – other players stated that Azure Synapse would be too expensive for us.
Our Insight Discovery process helped define and prioritise solution requirements by establishing audiences and their next best actions - identifying the data and functionality needed to drive goal-based decision making for each use case.
During the delivery phase, we designed and implemented the necessary architecture, data taxonomy, ingestion pipelines and interactive reports to support the detailed requirements identified during the Discovery phase. This included deploying our “Modern Data Platform Landing Zone” IP to provision baseline infrastructure, defining and implement additional solution architecture, according to scope and need identified in Discovery phase, implement automated DevOps processes for continuous integration and deployment of solution artefacts, designing and implementing Power BI reports, according to requirements identified and designing and implementing data pipelines needed to the deliver reports. Through development, sets of executable specifications were created to test the report calculation logic and Architecture Decision Records were written and version controlled to provide an auditable trail of decision making.
Since handing over the core platform and processes to the new team, endjin provide weekly and ongoing support through a retained Brain Trust model – dedicated time each week that can be used to discuss questions, and provide advice and expertise about the platform – providing the team with a safety net without leaving them dependent on endjin for success. In addition to the ongoing technical support, endjin also provide a monthly executive Brain Trust to provide external advice on higher level strategy and roadmap.
