Why You Should Consider Outsourcing Your Pension Fund’s IT Support

Outsourcing the IT support role can help solve many issues facing today’s pension funds. IT managers can free-up time for their staff, effectively allowing them to concentrate on more strategic operations, instead of fighting support fires. Outsourcing can also help improve response times and ensure constant vigilance on your systems, 24×7.

A qualified managed service provider can step in to proactively monitor and identify issues before they become a major problem.

Following are five key benefits that you’ll gain from outsourcing IT support through an MSP, especially one who has deep experience serving the alternative finance industry:

1. You’ll Stay Focused on Your Core Business

Pension funds that outsource their IT support services for upgrading infrastructure and core systems can stay focused on higher priorities and have more hours in their day for value creation. In-house pension fund IT teams also gain more time back when they delegate their support function to an outsourced group. This effectively frees-up resources to focus on priority matters including special projects.

In-house pension fund IT teams know their business better than anyone. While they concentrate on their business’s strategic functions, as well as ensure that their IT is properly aligned with their business challenges rather than spending valuable resources as a help desk to their users, the MSP can focus on supporting the business and protecting it.

2. Receive ‘Round-the-Clock Attention

As emphasized earlier, IT issues don’t keep regular business hours. It’s important to constantly monitor systems and proactively manage IT issues as they arise. Outsourcing your pension fund’s IT support to a reliable provider means that your business can easily gain access to quality technical support 24x7x365.

Through state-of-the-art monitoring systems, the MSP’s engineers are often able to identify potential problems before they seriously start to impact business operations.

3. Level the Playing Field

Smaller pension funds can’t always afford to match the in-house support services that larger pension plans maintain. Outsourcing can help smaller funds act “big” by giving them access to similar technology and the expertise that large funds enjoy. An independent third-party managed IT cost structure and economy of scale can provide smaller funds a true competitive advantage while also staying on top of the latest cyber threats.

4. Realize Rapid Resolutions

It’s critical to leverage an IT partner who holds themselves accountable. Top MSPs are SLA-driven. Such providers pride themselves on rapid response times, which they continually measure and analyze. A vigilant MSP will develop and utilize proprietary automation of all their alerts which effectively reduces the time to resolve an employee’s technical problem. Their goal is to gain knowledge about an issue before it’s reported by a user.

5. Receive Top-Tier Service

Smart pension plans also know that they’ll receive superior support from an IT provider experienced in serving asset managers. Such a highly-specialized MSP will recruit and retain that rare breed of IT professionals who truly understand the unique environment and requirements of the alternative investment sector, including pension funds. An IT engineer with deep domain expertise in financial services can interpret issues and provide rapid response because they understand the unique issues that can affect financial organizations.

Thrive’s deep experience with hedge funds and other alternative investments positions us well to handle outsourced IT support for pension funds. If you have any questions about Thrive’s outcourced IT support offerings, contact us today.