The Top 3 Reasons to Embrace Managed Services
Based on our research into Financial Service firms reevaluating market data operational support, 3 things that consistently come up as areas that need to be addressed are:
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Cost
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Attrition
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Skilled Staff
In this blog we will take a deep look into these and how Managed Services resolve these concerns.
Cost
Legacy support models are very expensive and are based on models that are 20 years old. For example, support engineers no longer need to go into a data center to make changes to servers or networks. Firms either have teams dedicated to those types of changes or it is outsourced to a smart-hands provider. As technologies have changed over the last 2 decades, outsourcing of platforms and delivery to hosted or cloud providers has replaced large, deployed infrastructure. Supporting those systems 24x7x365 requires a small army of people with an average loaded labor rate being $250,000 per year.
Attrition
I’m sure everyone reading this blog has seen on LinkedIn all the job postings and people posting that they are starting a new position. This has created a lot of movement in our industry and puts operation teams at a risk of not being able to support their business. Finding new replacements takes time, is expensive, and there is no guarantee that the new employee is a good fit or will stay. We’ve been asked many times if we know someone who can fill an operations role due to attrition.
Skilled Staff
Financial Service operation teams require a highly skilled staff that requires very specific skills around the delivery, support, and administration of their market data platforms.
How Managed Services addresses the above
It has long been recognized that managed services provide cost benefits that can reach upwards of 60% against existing in-house models. Managed service models also provide additional value-added services further adding to the benefits of outsourcing.
Managed services have been immune to risk that localized proximity models have. The unknown fact is that managed services providers have been operating from the cloud and remotely for decades. Whether it be a 100-year storm or a pandemic, clients that have leveraged managed services are the ones that have seen no impact to their production trading infrastructures, clearing systems, data warehouses, etc. during these events.
Firms managing their market data platforms with an in-house team are understaffed and barely able to meet business needs. They require enough resources to monitor and support these platforms 24X7 and ensure coverage for vacation, sick, personal time, and attrition. The amount of Move/Add/Change work to accommodate has consumed 200% of everyone’s time. Commercial administration, inventory management and audit exercises only increase that number.
Managed services providers are able to provide on-demand resources and are already equipped to support the industry. Issues like security, proper system access, bandwidth, and redundancy are all built into managed service provider models. These providers are well vetted and adhere to strict SLA’s so there are no disruptions to service.
ABOUT WEST HIGHLAND SUPPORT SERVICES
West Highland Support Services is the leading managed services provider for the financial community providing a 24X7 comprehensive Market Data Managed Services. We are the Gold Standard for Managed Services bringing a full suite of products and services that reduce cost, time spent, introduce automation innovations, improve accuracy, and provide transparency to all aspects of the market data ecosystem. Our collaborative approach enhances the client model while reducing the cost of supporting market data environments, reducing risk to the business and eliminating outages. We work with our clients to maximize the cost benefit and adapt to any situation that would impact the firm. West Highland is vendor agnostic and have a proactive, best practices approach to ensuring clients get the benefits of those experiences.
