Founded in 2002, innovative fintech company FISCAL Technologies is the leading provider of forensic solutions that empower purchase-to-pay (P2P) teams to protect organisational spend. Ultimately, the company creates software that prevents money from mistakenly or fraudulently leaving an organisation. It offers a variety of forensic solutions that analyse financial transactions across the entire P2P process, finding anomalies, errors, duplicates and identifying potential fraud. With offices in the UK and the US, FISCAL has experienced seven years of profitable growth, with ambitious plans for the future.
The challenge
FISCAL Technologies’ customers place a premium on their security. Some of their customers require contractual certainty that their data does not come into contact with any organisation that has any kind of relationship with the US or American organisations due to data sovereignty requirements. FISCAL had kept US and UK customers’ data stored in the same data centre in the UK, but subsequently needed to split the data because of this segregation requirement. Whilst FISCAL partnered with a company in the US for their American customers, they found that their previous UK provider, who had been in place for three years, did not have adequate measures in place to guarantee adherence to their client’s data sovereignty requirements.
In order to guarantee its customers with complete certainty that they fulfilled the above requirements, FISCAL needed a hosting and infrastructure provider that not only met all the most recent security accreditations, but also had security embedded in everything it did. In particular, adherence to the ISO 27001 security standard – a comprehensive, technology-neutral specification that deploys a risk-based approach going across all sections of an organisation – was key.
Moreover, as an ambitious organisation looking to accelerate its growth, FISCAL needed a partner who could not only keep up with them, but would have both the capacity and the drive to grow with FISCAL and be adaptable to its requirements. Another critical consideration was experience, and FISCAL sought a partner that had a heritage of working with other fintech and financial services firms.
Our Ultra Secure solution
FISCAL embarked on a wide-ranging procurement process – and quickly found that The Bunker stood out for its security provision, which was more comprehensive than any other they had encountered before and covered all the necessary accreditations, including ISO 27001. With a significant amount of experience working in the fintech sector, The Bunker fitted the bill perfectly.
The Bunker’s solution was a virtual environment, with powerful SQL Server databases, load balanced firewalls, and active directory domain controllers. This system delivers not only a robust approach to data and system security, but also the speedy performance and seamless management that FISCAL requires in order to deal with the sheer volume of data and amount of processing that it manages for its customers.
Results and benefits delivered
Demonstrating a high-level of security compliance has provided a powerful new business impetus for FISCAL.
Howard Durdle, CTO at FISCAL, commented: "Being in financial services, security is absolutely paramount, and for many of our customers, having the level of security provided by The Bunker was a prerequisite to making deals. For example, for a large defence contractor who placed huge value on security and on their data not touching the US, The Bunker were a vital element to passing a lengthy procurement process and securing a deal. Hosting our customers’ data in a former Ministry of Defence bunker, deep underground and fully insulated from the outside world, gives us a powerful story to tell potential and current customers about the importance we place on security."
Moreover, the benefits of running a fully virtualised estate are clear to Howard: “In the case of any kind of system failures, we can migrate virtually across to other parts of the infrastructure, massively reducing any potential for downtime – not that it’s been an issue as of yet.”
Their verdict
Howard said: “"It’s hugely important to our clients to have certain security guarantees in place. The Bunker is distinct for a security culture that is deeply embedded in its DNA, and for having a more comprehensive security provision than anyone else we spoke to."
"We have mutually complementary narratives: FISCAL is absolutely focused on protecting organisations’ money, whilst The Bunker has the same obsession with protecting organisations’ data. This cultural overlap has made for a productive partnership."
"FISCAL is still in the process of moving their customers off the old platform, but is looking to expand the virtual infrastructure and to double its customer load over the next year whilst maintaining current performance levels."
