Sarasin & Partners is a privately owned firm of asset managers, headquartered in the heart of London’s financial district. A specialist in sustainable investing, the firm provides services to charities, private clients, pension funds, independent financial advisors, families, and institutions.
Sarasin & Partners is responsible for investing £13.9 billion on behalf of its clients so auditable processes are crucial. However, paper forms and manual processes interfered with efficiency. With K2 Software, the firm is streamlining processes like logging operational risk incidents and making compliance more efficient. After automating just 1 process, staff members involved in the process save 8 hours of time per week, and more process improvements across the business are on the way.
Automating processes across the business
Challenge: Inefficiencies with paper forms
With a focus on sustainability, Sarasin & Partners continually seeks ways in which to reduce paper consumption across the business. Before implementing Nintex Automation K2, the firm often relied on paper forms, which complicated processes involving several departments and staff members.
For example, documents requiring approval signatures could be generated by 220 members of staff and passed across up to 8 different desks, over 3 floors in the building. Approval processes took many days to complete, and it was often necessary for employees to phone or email their colleagues to ascertain the status of an approval. Hard-copy documents took time to collate, and the firm realized it needed to automate processes around critical processes.
Initially, the firm set out to automate just one process: logging incidents around operational risks. After evaluating many of the common risk management and incident reporting solutions used in the financial industry, the IT team at Sarasin & Partners realized a process automation platform would be a better fit for a company focused on large-scale business process improvement.
Solution: A solution for continual improvement
“The risk management packages offered a lot of functionality we weren’t going to use and were similar in price to Nintex Automation K2 [Software] solutions,” said Stuart Bonnell, Head of IT at Sarasin & Partners. “By opting for Nintex Automation K2 [Software] instead, we gained a business workflow platform we could use to not only improve our incident reporting but also streamline many other processes throughout our business as part of our ongoing program of continuous business improvements.”
Now, Sarasin & Partners has six automated processes in production and many more in development. With its very first solution, the firm reduced the time required to record operational risk incidents, share information internally, identify mitigations, and take appropriate action by 75%.
The IT team at Sarasin & Partners found it very easy to get up and running with Nintex Automation K2. After two days of on-site support, the team was able to refer to online training resources and quickly build bespoke business processes. “It was very easy to integrate Nintex Automation K2 with our in-house investment management system using the SQL broker,” Bonnell says. “It really did take just a few clicks.”
Looking ahead, the company has plans to develop many more automated processes, further increasing the return on its investment from Nintex Automation K2. “Users have provided positive feedback that our processes are quicker and more straightforward than they were before,” Bonnell says. “Now we are moving ahead with new processes to aid the continuous development of our business.”
