Capital International

Moving office is never easy, but Capital International – one of the Island’s largest investment and business solutions companies – recently faced the challenge of moving from two separate office locations into one building – a building which itself had to be extensively renovated and upgraded, all without disrupting the service provided to clients. However, after five months of hard work, plus a significant investment in technology, Capital International – which was named Company of the Year at this year’s Isle of Man Newspapers Awards for Excellence – now operates from one of the most advanced office buildings on the Isle of Man.

Founded in 1996 as a stock broking operation in just one small office in Castletown, Capital International has grown significantly over the years and, today, the Capital International Group consists of five companies, each with a clearly defined product and service offering. Services provided by group companies include stock broking, advisory and discretionary investment management services, fund administration, cash management treasury services, third party investment administration, and innovative tax products. Clients include a wide range of institutions, investment professionals, financial advisers, and private individuals both on and off-Island.

The company also offers a growing range of outsourced services, including IT support, web design, pay-roll and HR functions, finance and accounting, marketing, and other managed services, which it offers to medium sized business on the Isle of Man and in the UK.

With approximately $4.5 billion of client assets under administration, some 60 staff, plus an ever growing range of products and services, Capital International is one of the largest companies of its kind operating on the Island. Growth in recent years has been particularly impressive; turnover has doubled since 2008, the company has added in excess of $2 billion of new clients’ assets within the last 12 months, plus shown a record increase in profits. All of this in what – by any standards – has been a challenging economic environment.

Success, of course, brings its own pressures and Capital International had outgrown its offices in Douglas and Castletown, and decided to move into one larger location in Douglas.

According to Chief Executive Officer, Anthony Long, “Our diversification, and in particular our accelerated growth over the past two years, meant that we needed new and larger premises. We felt that moving to one building would help us be more cohesive as a Group, all working together in one location. Equally important was our desire to upgrade our core telecoms and IT systems. We have always been innovative in our use of technology but we knew that a new building – fitted out to our own specification – would enable us to improve efficiency, and to give a better service to our customers. Another key requirement was scalability; we needed somewhere where there was enough headroom – in terms of space and technology – to continue to grow.”

The hunt was on for a building which would meet Capital International’s demanding criteria. Douglas emerged as a natural choice of location, and the Old Post Office building on Circular Road was identified as a suitable option. Empty for some years, it had the potential to become the perfect base for the next phase of Capital International’s development.

Capital International has always invested heavily in its IT and telecoms infrastructure. Over the years, it has developed innovative portfolio management systems, custody platforms, online portfolio services, and customer relationship management systems. It was also an early adopter of paperless document filing systems. However, the move to a new building presented it with an opportunity to take a substantial technological step forward, and to undertake a complete revamp of not just its telecoms, but also its IT systems.

A small in-house team lead by Simon Booth, Senior Manager, I.T., developed and built an entirely new IT infrastructure, transferring all of Capital International’s IT operations onto new virtualised servers while the servers were still located in their existing offices.

Virtualisation is a leading edge technology which enables companies to reduce their IT costs while increasing the efficiency, utilisation, and flexibility of their IT infrastructure. Amongst other things, it offers maximum operational flexibility, enabling a company to respond to market changes with dynamic resource management, faster server provisioning and improved desktop and application deployment.

“Once we had the new servers up and running” says Simon,” we could have moved them to the new offices, along with everything else. However, in addition to talking to Manx Telecom about the telecoms side of our relocation, we became aware of the capability of their Douglas North Data Centre, which is truly phenomenal. We quickly realised that locating our own servers within Manx Telecom’s Data Centre was a far better option. Douglas North really does provide exemplary levels of resilience and security in a totally controlled environment, with continuity of service delivered in most foreseeable circumstances.”

Data Centre

For Manx Telecom, it was natural to highlight the Data Centre’s capabilities to Capital International. “Capital International is a large and diversified business, and they are sophisticated users of high end technology,” says Roberta Castle from Manx Telecom. “We felt that our Data Centre, the only purpose built facility of its kind on the Island, could offer them something special; something to really match their needs. We knew also that they would be demanding customers and that the transition of telecoms and IT systems to the new building had to be seamless. It was quite a challenge, but the professionalism of Capital International’s in-house team made it very rewarding project on which to work.”

The refurbishment and fitting out of the new building – renamed Capital House – took some five months and involved 50 tradesmen working 7 days a week.

Capital House now has a sophisticated communications system which incorporates the latest Mitel office telephony systems to enable the company to maximise the flexibility and productivity of staff. In addition, all the company’s mobile and BlackBerry telecoms were also consolidated with Manx Telecom.

“We were very impressed,” said Simon, “by Manx Telecom’s understanding of our needs, and the faultless way in which they were able to provide a fully integrated telecoms package.”

The newly virtualised IT systems, and their seamless migration to the Manx Telecom Data Centre, was undertaken over just one weekend.

In effect, Capital International’s entire IT infrastructure is now hosted at Douglas North. “We believe,” said Simon “that we are one of the first companies on the Isle of Man to push the entire virtual server and virtual desktop systems architecture to an external hosting environment. Doing so has delivered significant benefits, giving us more flexibility in the way we use our IT. It’s also more cost effective, and offers us virtually unlimited scope for expansion for both our own services and the services we are able to offer clients and other companies. We were impressed by the quality and capability of Manx Telecom’s Data Centre operations, which has played a key role in helping us achieve our objectives. We look forward to working with them in the future to expand our systems to even higher levels of sophistication as we grow and develop the business.”

Business Centre

In addition to housing all of Capital International’s operations, the first floor of Capital House will be occupied by the Isle of Man Business Centre, a new facility offering high quality meeting rooms and offices exclusively for members. The Business Centre will also become the new home of the Isle of Man Chamber of Commerce, and will host the Isle of Man Government Business Incubation Service. One of the attractions of basing themselves in Capital House is, of course, that these third party businesses and their clients will be able to take advantage of the building’s state of the art IT infrastructure via managed solutions offered by the Capital International Group.

“The entire project, the quality of the finished building, and its technological sophistication,” says Anthony Long, “is a vindication of our decision to make the move and to invest so heavily in Capital House. It’s an investment which underlines our continued commitment and confidence in the Isle of Man economy and reflects the significant future growth plans we have for the Group."