Creating and delivering the Harbour investor suitability system to professional financial advisers and planners requires skills in multiple disciplines: regulatory understanding, business process analysis and understanding as well as technology and online delivery.Financial advice is a highly regulated environment and so understanding and interpreting the FCA’s Codes of Business and Systems & Controls is vital. The current fixation on risk profiling by many is a falsehood; read COBS9 and it mentions the term once. In Harbour, we have created a multi-dimensional investor suitability solution, not a simplistic one dimensional risk profile tool.Building efficient online systems involves understanding business processes, making systems easy to use and recognising the needs for report generation. Furthermore, having captured data, analysing the business and regulatory environment to help raise the performance of the user, the firm and provide addition tools such as dynamic management information that makes auditing easy and warns business owners of risk clusters.Having spent far too many years in the IT sector, sixteen years of which involved the delivery of high volume online mortgage and insurance systems, exploiting technology for businesses comes as second nature. I gave up being a software enginner long before the term was invented and I leave database design, programming and the creation of user interfaces to my team. After all, I have more than enough to do bringing Harbour to the attention of more financial advisory and planning firms that want to leave risk profiling behind and adopt a more customer relevant, efficient and effective approach.

Plus Eight specialises in delivering web-based services and consultancy to both commercial and private sector organisations. Its services include:• High performance content managed websites;• Online web-based business applications;• Managed hosting and web business continuity management services;• Regulatory compliant investor suitability systems (Harbour).Harbour is probably the best solution for establishing an investor’s investment suitability profile, enhancing the client/adviser relationship and fulfilling the process in a clear and recorded way as required by financial regulators.Our team members have a background spanning almost two decades of delivering online solutions to leading organisations engaged in mortgage and retail savings, asset management and recovery, onshore and offshore investment management, manufacturing as well as public sector including NHS Direct, security and local government.

An associate partner of Sagis LLP specialising in eCommerce, self service solutions and systems integration.

Responsible for the market strategy and tactical marketing of Amatica as well as providing business development and account management functions.Opened business relationships with major financial services organisations such as Birmingham Midshires, Bank of Scotland International, Halifax Estate Agency and Vertex Financial Services as well as investment fund managers in London and Guernsey where I continued by fulfilling an account management role.Established Amatica as a leading self-service kiosk solutions provider by successfully winning and delivering high profile projects to local government organisations as well as a £2½M procurement contract with NHS Direct.

Established SDS as a start-up company providing specialist recruitment and training services to large companies. Turnover rose from £½m in year one to over £3m.Typical customers included Barclays Bank, Cooperative Wholesale Society, ICL-Fujitsu, Morgan Grenfell Bank, Royal & SunAlliance, Royal Liver Assurance, Severn Trent Water and Woolworth.