Abacus Group, a leading provider of hosted IT solutions and application hosting for alternative investment firms, today announced the expansion of its London office into a new, larger space to accommodate its growth in the UK.
The new Abacus office is strategically located near the firm’s client base in the West End, and is poised to absorb the company’s anticipated continued record growth in the UK during the rest of 2018 and into next year. Over the last year, Abacus has tripled its UK client base, made up of hedge funds, private equity firms, mutual funds, family offices, asset managers and independent software vendors. Clients rely on the highly resilient Abacus Private Cloud, hosted within diverse London area data centres, which also underwent an expansion into a larger footprint in fall 2017.
The innovative Abacus Cloud platform allows investment managers to source all technology needs as a service. It offers the capacity to scale on-demand to meet a firm’s current and future cybersecurity and compliance requirements, and is suited for firms of all sizes - from small start-ups to larger, technically sophisticated firms.
Led by Tom Cole, formerly CTO at a large London hedge fund, the leadership team in the Abacus London office includes Dean Jones overseeing client services and Craig Bowles overseeing systems and infrastructure teams. Having come to Abacus from hedge funds themselves, the entire team understands first-hand the unique IT and business challenges faced by investment firms in the UK and EU markets.
Abacus promotes an international staff relocation programme, whereby members of the Abacus team are given the opportunity to relocate to different offices and regions. This programme sets out to motivate team members, create new internal opportunities and offer clients a truly global service organisation. A recent new addition to the London team is Michael Regan, a project manager who’s been with Abacus for over three years, previously in the New York office. “Mike has experience working across all Abacus teams and onboarding new clients to our hosted IT platform,” said Tom Cole, Director - Europe at Abacus Group. “Michael is a testament to our international staffing programme, immediately gelling with the local team and showcasing the Abacus way to project management.”
One of Abacus’s global initiatives is the compliance toolkit it provides all clients, with access to a proprietary Client Portal that houses a library of important investor due diligence and compliance documents. The readily available information enables clients to meet the vendor management and transparency requirements of not just the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) but also the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Along these lines, in preparation for MiFID II that went into effect 3rdJanuary 2018, Abacus delivered a call-recording capability to accompany its hosted voice product for UK-based clients. Abacus also recently announced the addition of a fully integrated option to use Microsoft Office 365 with its AbacusFLEXä IT-as-a-Service product, with single sign-on capability, maintaining the functionality, user experience and security of its standard product offering.
Abacus is nearing completion of regulatory requirements for the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) going into effect on 25th May 2018. Abacus as a global organisation was holistically reviewed to understand implications and identify opportunities and efficiencies. As a result of this approach, the Abacus information security team has recognized synergies between preparing for Privacy Shield Certification in the US and GDPR compliance in the UK and the EU. Thus, the team is applying a global framework to tackle data privacy as it relates to both endeavours and has found that the majority of the requirements for GDPR have already been met by its existing security programmes.