At Frontier, we have spent the last five years developing our client- and partner-facing systems, such as the award-winning Frontier Partners Platform. To achieve this, we organised ourselves strategically to place innovation at the heart of everything we do. The result, we believe, is a fundamentally new way of working with partners and clients – truly disruptive both in terms of how we deliver our traditional investment consulting capabilities, and our ability to continuously develop relevant business solutions for our rapidly evolving clients.
Much of this innovation occurs behind the scenes – a good example is our novel use of Mathworks’ MATLAB to power our quantitative solutions. Encapsulating our models, in MATLAB modules, allows us to run the same repeatable, quality-assured analysis internally that we provide externally for client use via our web-based tools. Furthermore, our workflow allows rapid deployment of new or customised models to the Prism application in response to client needs. This approach was noted by Mathworks as an Australian first, and was presented by them at their global developer conference in 2015.
A key part of our innovation strategy is to equip all our investment consultants with the technology tools they require to work flexibly with clients. We aim to provide access to all our systems, data and documents from anywhere, at any time – an initiative we named the Mobile Consulting Platform. All of Frontier’s Consultants are issued with tablet devices and we use Cloud technologies such as OneDrive to achieve this mobile consulting approach.
Of course, innovation is not possible without a solid and reliable technology foundation underpinning it all. We take security, resilience and disaster recovery very seriously and in particular, the safety and security of our client’s data is paramount. We work closely with our technology partners, for example using a hybrid on-premise and private cloud infrastructure to host all our systems in a highly resilient manner.
Our specialist resources have steadily increased over the course of our technology journey. We have a fantastic team (Carrie Smith, Rachel Mohr, Laura Daly) dedicated to the Frontier Partners Platform – supporting users, system testing, tirelessly administrating content and running compliance processes on behalf of clients. We also have highly talented developers on the quantitative side (Ian Yun, James Chang) who bring with them a deep knowledge of financial markets. We work closely with an outsourced development team at our service provider, Viatek, who build all our client-facing system front-ends. One of the most notable features of our development capability, however, is how our wider Business Solutions teams and investment consulting staff have embraced technology innovation and drive projects forward together with the technology specialists.
Working together, we now have a highly capable team to develop our own technology and provide bespoke technology solutions to clients – ranging from quantitative modelling, databases and data management, to technology strategy and consulting. Please get in touch to discuss any of these aspects further.
