A financial services firm’s IT is never just IT; it is regulated infrastructure. The client files are FCA-relevant records, the email trail is evidence, the advice platform is the business, and every system failure has a compliance shadow: what was missed, what cannot be evidenced, what the regulator would make of it. Generic IT support treats these as office systems; firms need a provider who understands they are the practice’s regulatory footing.
We support IFAs, mortgage and insurance brokers, wealth managers and financial planning firms across Scotland (a sector particularly thick on the ground in Edinburgh and Perth) from our Dundee Technology Park base.
What makes financial services IT different
The regulator now cares about your resilience directly. The FCA’s operational resilience agenda has pushed expectations that once applied only to banks down into smaller firms: know your important business services, know how long they could be disrupted before causing harm, and be able to show your working. For a small firm that translates into exactly the disciplines covered elsewhere on this site (defined recovery objectives, tested continuity arrangements, documented incident response), except here they are not best practice; they are the direction of regulatory travel, and due-diligence questionnaires from networks and providers already ask.
Records are evidence with retention clocks. Advice records, suitability reports, client communications and call recordings carry multi-year retention obligations, and their integrity matters as much as their existence: a firm must be able to produce the record as it was, years later, through staff changes and system migrations. That is an archiving and backup design problem with compliance requirements attached, including for the Microsoft 365 data most firms wrongly assume is keeping itself.
The money makes you a priority target. Firms that instruct transfers and hold client financial details sit in the same crosshairs as the legal sector: mailbox compromise followed by payment redirection, timed to real transactions. The defence stack is familiar (enforced MFA, monitored endpoint detection, targeted staff training) plus procedure: no payment-detail change actioned on email alone, ever, with the technology built to support the callback discipline rather than undermine it.
The platform stack is vendor-run, the accountability is yours. Back-office systems, platforms, provider extranets, research tools: mostly cloud services run by their vendors, with your firm accountable for access control, secure devices and the connectivity they depend on. Our job is that accountable layer: the environment, the devices, the identity security and the vendor-wrangling when something between systems breaks.
Professional credibility is checkable. Networks, platforms and professional indemnity insurers increasingly ask for security evidence, with Cyber Essentials the recognisable answer, and clients entrusting life savings are entitled to assume competence behind the scenes.
What our financial services IT support covers
- Resilience engineering with the paperwork. Recovery objectives set per system against client-harm timescales, tested restores with logged results, and continuity documentation written to survive a due-diligence questionnaire, not just a bad day.
- Retention-grade data protection. Backup and archiving designed to your record-keeping obligations, immutable copies that survive both ransomware and error, and integrity you can evidence.
- Identity and email security at target-sector standard. Enforced MFA and conditional access, mailbox monitoring for the compromise patterns that precede payment fraud, and M365 hardening as baseline rather than project.
- Clean access lifecycle. Advisers and staff joined and removed with same-day discipline, access scoped to role, and the audit trail intact: the questions compliance consultants ask, pre-answered.
- Certification and questionnaires. Cyber Essentials handled end to end, and accurate technical answers for network, platform and insurer due diligence, drawn from how your systems actually run.
- Deadline-aware support. Response priorities that understand a platform outage during a market move or a tax-year-end is not a routine ticket.
Sized for real firms
Most of the firms we talk to are 2 to 30 people: directly authorised or network members, no IT staff, a compliance function that is one person part-time, and systems accumulated over years of platform changes. Standard per-user managed pricing applies; the regulated-sector layer above is how the service is delivered, not a surcharge. Firms with an operations manager carrying the IT burden informally tend to feel the relief fastest.
Frequently asked questions
Does the FCA require specific IT arrangements for small firms?
The FCA’s expectations are outcome-based rather than prescriptive: firms should understand their important services, their tolerance for disruption, and be able to evidence resilience and data protection appropriate to their size. In practice, documented recovery objectives, tested backups and incident procedures answer the questions as they actually arrive: via due diligence and, occasionally, after incidents.
How long do we need to keep client records, and what does that mean for IT?
Retention periods vary by product and record type, commonly running to five or six years and longer for some business, per FCA rules and your compliance advice. The IT consequence is uniform: archives and backups must reach that far back, restorably, with integrity, across system changes: a design requirement, not a storage setting.
What’s the biggest cyber risk for an advice firm?
Mailbox compromise leading to payment redirection, timed to real client transactions. Enforced MFA, monitoring and an inviolable callback procedure for payment details are the defence; the firms that get hit are almost always missing one of the three.
Do we need Cyber Essentials as a financial services firm?
Increasingly, practically yes: networks, platforms and PI insurers ask, and it is the fastest checkable evidence of baseline security. The preparation also happens to close the actual attack routes above.
Can you work alongside our compliance consultant?
Naturally: they own the regulatory interpretation, we own the technical implementation and evidence. The pairing works because the questionnaires they help you answer are largely about systems we run.
What does IT support cost for a small advice firm?
Standard managed rates (£50 to £85 per user monthly for most firms at the standard tier), with the premium security tier justified more often in this sector than most. One prevented payment-fraud incident funds the difference for years.
Get the audit your due diligence assumes you’ve had
The free IT health check maps your systems against exactly what this page describes: resilience, retention, identity security and the payment-fraud defences, with findings in plain English you can hand to compliance. Get in touch; the next questionnaire is already in someone’s outbox.
