Ten10 Academy helped Equiniti Financial Services overcome their technical talent challenges through the provision of graduate resources in a blended team

Background

Equiniti Life and Pensions specialises in providing finely tuned finance and complex administration services. As the UK’s leading independent provider of annuity services, Equiniti offers a proven full annuity administration service, encompassing customer management, new business, payment and payroll processing (including the new options available following Pensions reform). This enables their clients to focus on new business development, capital requirements and funds under management while knowing that administration and payments are in safe hands.

Equiniti had recently acquired Retirement Advantage, a specialist provider of retirement products and planned to migrate the entire portfolio of products to a single platform, Composer from GBST, already used by Retirement Advantage. To ensure the success of this migration Equiniti identified Ten10 as a QA specialist to assist with the project, providing managerial support and hands-on resources.

Client Requirements and Challenges

Due to the complexity of business processes and technical knowledge required to effectively understand Composer, Retirement Advantage had needed to rely on a small number of contractors. This presented the usual challenges of cost, lack of scalability and the lack of knowledge retention.

With such a large and business-critical programme of work planned, Retirement Advantage/Equiniti deemed it essential to mitigate these challenges and identify a solution that would provide the support required through the lengthy end-to-end testing phases planned.

As a trusted QA partner to Retirement Advantage, Ten10 was requested to put forward a solution that would ensure long term knowledge retention, guaranteed project commitment, and an attractive cost model.

Ten10’s Technical Resourcing Solution

Ten10 provided a solution incorporating a blended team, comprising of two senior resources and four Ten10 Academy Engineers.

Ten10 Academy’s model provides clients with bright, capable and keen individuals who have the attitude and aptitude for testing, development, business analysis and DevOps.

The senior resources provided the initial project support and oversight to ensure the Ten10 Academy Engineers hit the ground running and were successfully embedded into Equiniti’s established teams. Whilst the senior resources’ focus was on the higher level test planning, the Ten10 Academy Engineers were tasked with familiarising themselves with the application and required business processes.

Within a matter of weeks, the Ten10 Academy Engineers proved more than capable; quickly taking on increasingly complex scripting tasks, whilst also creating a knowledge repository to be shared amongst the team and with any additional resources set to join the programme.

Business Outcome

The Ten10 Academy Engineers remain with the organisation. Having successfully delivered the programme, the core business knowledge they have built up is now utilised across new programmes. In addition, the knowledge base has created an easily accessible resource for new joiners to review, further accelerating the
on-boarding process.

The senior resources engaged at the onset of the programme have rotated off, reducing the overall team costs. The original Ten10 Academy Engineers are now operating at a more senior level, interacting more closely with the business and providing support and leadership to new Ten10 Academy Engineers that join.

Equiniti now has a solution that provides core platform experience and continuity of resource and knowledge, all provided at a competitive cost point.