At a time when many firms in highly regulated industry sectors are taking a very cautious approach to cloud computing, it’s refreshing to find a financial services company that is using cloud to its full advantage.
But then, Fieldpoint Private is different from most financial service firms. The Greenwich, Conn., wealth advisory and private banking firm serves high net worth families and institutions and offers highly personalized customer relationships. It is lean and mean by choice.
Fieldpoint Private was launched in 2008 by a group of 31 luminaries in the financial industry who thought big banks had lost their focus and weren’t serving the needs of high-end clients. With a “smaller-is-better” corporate philosophy, it may not be a surprise that Fieldpoint has no CIO and no internal IT operations. Instead, it hosts all of its IT in the cloud.
Keeping It Personal
The firm’s clients “have extremely complex financial situations, and we're able to provide completely custom solutions for each of our individual members,” Joseph Larizza, Chief Administrative Officer, told Smart Enterprise Exchange recently. IT services — specifically, the public cloud and software as a service providers (SaaS) platforms— are critical to the firm’s success.
Fieldpoint has three guiding principles for its IT organization, Larizza says. One is to make sure that all costs are budgeted as operating — rather than capital — expense. Another is to focus only on its core competency. And a third is to keep its internal IT staff as small as possible. Leveraging public cloud services helps Fieldpoint Private achieve all of these objectives.
“Our goal is to be as 100 percent cloud-based as possible,” Larizza says. When evaluating solutions, “the first thing we look for is what we refer to as ‘service as a service,’ where not only are we outsourcing the actual software, but the running of the software itself.”
Then, the firm looks for Software-as-a-Service offerings such as Salesforce.com’s CRM. “Only then do we look for Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service [solutions],” to maintain the actual infrastructure, Larizza says.
Agile Solutions
Probably the biggest benefit the bank derives from its cloud platform is the ability to be agile and very client-centric, Larizza says. “We're able to move very quickly and deliver the solutions that the clients need much faster than if we built it ourselves.”
Hosted systems also provide Fieldpoint Private with a development staff that’s larger than that of its competitors’, Larizza says — without the overhead. “For instance, our online banking offering is a cloud-based solution from Intuit,” he says. “They have hundreds of staff dedicated to continual innovation of their product. That frees Fieldpoint Private to think about how to integrate all these tools in ways that further enhance the client experience.”
Another competitive advantage resulting from the cloud is aggregated performance reporting. “Every client can have an all-encompassing view of all assets — regardless of the firm that houses those assets.” Therefore, investment or other banking decisions can be made in the context of the whole wealth portfolio. “This is transformational for investing and could happen only with the cloud,” Larizza says.
Embracing Partnerships
The company’s corporate culture was a big factor in embracing cloud. “The move to cloud computing is less about the technology and is more about the culture,” Larizza says. “You have to have a culture where you're willing to give up control to a third party in order to get what you need.”
Fieldpoint Private shares its philosophy of cloud computing with its clients, too. “The initial concern is always about information security and information safety,” Larizza says. But he believes that with solutions such as CA CloudMinder™ Advanced Authentication for multifactor authentication, the clients are well protected.
“What we try to impress upon a client is [that] we're actually more secure in many ways than many of our competitors,” Larizza says. “All of our vendors and all of our partners focus their best resources on issues such as security.” When Fieldpoint feels secure with its partnerships, it can pass along that assurance to its clients — and that’s what high-end banking is all about.
