Goodbye 2020

As is customary at this time of year, I wanted to reflect on the year we have had at RFA. But how to recap on 2020? Where do I start with one of the most impactful years we’ve ever had?

It started so well too. We won awards in Europe and the US for our consultancy services, cybersecurity services and managed services. We took on new staff and won lots of new clients. Our R&D team was working on full power to develop a suite of new services and things were looking great.

Early on in January we started to hear rumours of a virus and decided to work through our clients to ensure their BCP strategies were up to date, that they had plans in place to cope with whatever disruption a pandemic (if that’s what this could become) could cause. However, we couldn’t possibly foresee the scale and severity of the disruption when the first global lockdown came into effect.

Thanks to our early preparations, most of our clients had BCPs which allowed for a proportion of the workforce to work remotely, but we had to work fast to allow them to significantly scale their remote operations. We quickly added extra remote desktops, upgraded networks, shipped routers, supplied hardware, organised VPNs and licenses to make sure our clients’ teams could safely and securely access their corporate networks from home.

Our own teams worked tirelessly to ensure clients’ service remained uninterrupted. To me and the leadership team at RFA, our staff team is as important as our clients and I focused on their wellbeing and mental health throughout. We developed our own workplace app which could monitor staff movement and ensure social distancing across our global locations.

For our clients, remote working became business as usual, but fears around cybersecurity attacks grew and phishing attacks increased more than threefold. Our attentions turned from helping clients to access their corporate networks, to protecting their digital assets. Our managed detection and response service, already in use across many of our clients, fit the bill perfectly. It ensures users and endpoints are monitored continuously, with AI enabled tools to highlight anomalies or discrepancies and skilled Security Engineers to investigate and remediate.

As the year wore on and clients started taking tentative steps back to the office, others were mulling over the concept of going “office-less”. We took our fully managed and supported cloud services and endpoint managed detection and response to design an office-less solution that would offer truly border-less technology.

Ironically, just as some of our clients are moving to smaller premises or giving up their offices, we relocated our London operation to a bigger office, just around the corner from our old premises in Mayfair. We grew our team by around 30% to support our growing client base in Europe and wanted to provide the team with more space to collaborate, meet and work together safely and effectively.

We’re also seeing greater interest in our Managed Data Services; cloud data warehouse and data management services and in our Managed Application Services. With custom development work we are building solutions to address specific challenges like on and offboarding new staff, vendor management, compensation management and performance modelling.

There is clear evidence that some firms have accelerated digital transformation projects in the sector.

There is clear evidence that some firms have accelerated digital transformation projects in the sector and a number of our private equity and hedge clients have benefitted from our Managed Application Services, streamlining and connecting data across different systems, using a common underlying framework and familiar Microsoft tools.

A big driver of our managed data services has been the increase in availability and accessibility of alternatives data. Rather than looking for ways to get data, managers are now looking for ways to better ingest and make sense of the data, to give them deeper insights and drive results. This is how we see them creating that crucial and elusive competitive edge as we head towards 2021.

As the year draws to its close, we’re all feeling grateful for a) satisfied, loyal clients and a significant number of new clients, b) the ability to anticipate, respond and adapt to changing market conditions and challenges and c) the best team of loyal, dedicated people anyone could ask for. Thank you all!

Now roll on 2021!