Background
Walbrook Capital Markets Limited (Walbrook) are a FCA-regulated, multi-asset brokerage based in the City of London. Incorporated in 1994, Walbrook has pedigree as a brokerage earned from almost 25 years of trading. Walbrook boast some of the most experienced financial professionals in London on their books.
Walbrook work with wealth managers, asset managers, institutional clients and frequent traders across a broad range of asset classes and account types, including equities, futures, options, FX, CFDs, ETFs, managed funds and fixed income.
The challenges they faced
In 2016, Walbrook had identified they needed a brand-new installation of Dynamics GP as the they were required to separate from a multi company implementation to an individual instance hosted on a separate infrastructure as Dan McBride Head of IT at Walbrook said: “We’d been using Dynamics GP for several years. We were very happy with it; we know the product well but were required to upgrade and replace Dynamics GP.”
Walbrook had already done their research – they knew exactly what system they wanted, they just needed it implemented quickly as Dan attributes “This was a time sensitive project. We needed an installation of Dynamics GP 2016 and various third party plugins and feeds we identified to be implemented quickly, with a minimum of disruption and downtime.”
Because of the size of their IT team, Walbrook needed a partner to help install and implement Dynamics GP. Their search for an experienced Dynamics partner led them to Advantage Business Systems, a Microsoft Gold Certified partner based in the City of London.
The solution implemented
It was a straightforward project for Advantage Business Systems (ABS), as Paddy Kelly, Dynamics GP sales manager at ABS explains: “Walbrook was a straightforward implementation. They’d come to us with an idea of what they wanted, so it was on us to deliver as quickly and efficiently as we could.”
The entire project took 7 weeks from start to finish. During that time, Walbrook received a fresh installation of Dynamics GP 2016 including sophisticated reporting features, advanced bank reconciliation and audit trails. Advantage also migrated all their existing data and settings from their previous installation of Dynamics GP.
Dynamics GP was the only choice according to Dan: “We’d been using Dynamics GP for several years now, but we had no intention of moving away from GP. We know that it’s a product that’s perfect for growing businesses but has the functionality and scalability to grow into an enterprise class solution.”
Dan recalls how Advantage guided himself and Walbrook through the entire process, “From the moment I met Paddy, Advantage were fantastic at communicating with us. The entire project was delivered to schedule and I want to go on record and say how professional Advantage and their team were throughout the process.”
The benefits
Implementation of the latest version of Dynamics GP puts Walbrook in a fantastic position for the future according to Paddy Kelly – “Walbrook now have a version of Dynamics GP that’ll be in place for years and has the capacity to provide stability with their back-end functions and will support anticipated growth.”
Since project completion, the finance team have benefitted the most at Walbrook as Dan attributes: “It’s really helped our finance team. They can work effectively exactly as they did pre-migration. The reporting suite is much more sophisticated than our previous system and allows us to have clear insight into transactions going in and out of Walbrook.”
Dan was full of praise for Advantage when we asked how we did “It was a fantastic implementation, and we were really pleased with the way Advantage handled it all. We chose Advantage specifically because of their expertise with rapid Dynamics GP implementation but also because of how professional their team came across.”
“Throughout the process, the team delivered to deadlines, showed determination to drive the project forwards and went above and beyond what we expected really. I’d whole heartedly recommend Advantage to other businesses in a similar position.”
