Walker Crips
Walker Crips Customizes RingCentral to Comply with Industry Regulations Regarding Call Recording
RingCentral is way ahead in terms of innovation. It has plenty of functionality: It brings big-company systems to smaller companies. There’s a lot there.
Sean Lam
Group Managing Director, COO, CTO, Walker Crips
Walker Crips can trace its roots as far back as the 18th century, making it one of the oldest independent companies in the city of London. The firm has approximately 300 employees working in six business units: Investment Management, Stockbrokers, Wealth Management, Pensions, Structured Investments, and Alternative Investments.
Sean Lam is Walker Crips’s Group Managing Director as well as COO and CTO. Although he is an accountant by training, his fundamental philosophy is that technology is crucial to success.
INDUSTRY
Financial Services
HQ
London
YEAR FOUNDED
1914
EMPLOYEES
280
Moving to UCaaS for more functionality at a better price
Several years ago, Lam decided to upgrade Walker Crips’s phone system with the goal of getting more functionality at a lower cost. “We were on a legacy system with a lot of cost,” he explains. “Everything was physical, everything was on site, and every time we had to upgrade it was a big pain.” The current provider was willing to add some of the functionality he needed, such as more flexibility in recording calls, but that would have added to the cost. “They could give us what we needed, but it involved more equipment, and thus higher costs,” Lam adds.
He researched 25 unified communications as a service (UCaaS) solutions, then picked RingCentral and one other to evaluate more thoroughly. “The other was a hybrid solution,” he recalls. “RingCentral was fully cloud-based, which is one reason why I went with it.”
Several other aspects of RingCentral also made it stand out. “RingCentral is way ahead in terms of innovation,” Lam says. “It has plenty of functionality: It brings big-company systems to smaller companies. There’s a lot there.”
Another important reason for going with RingCentral was the company itself. “I look at my vendors not as pure vendors but as partners,” Lam says. “I really value RingCentral’s willingness to engage with us.”
Storing call recordings per industry regulations
As an example of RingCentral’s willingness to engage, Lam shares how RingCentral helped him with call recording, which is something his firm is required to do by financial industry regulations. “RingCentral helped me make recording more robust for my needs by giving me access to their API,” he explains, adding that RingCentral made his firm a beta site so he could have access to the API before it had been formally released to Europe.
Using the API platform, his programmers worked with RingCentral programmers to set up RingCentral so that it downloads call recordings to a storage array at the end of each day. “That was part one. Part two was we built our own search facility, integrating into our own CRM, using the RingCentral call reference data so that staff can pull up the calls from our own CRM system,” Lam says.
“RingCentral gives us a lot of control, and we have seen significant costs savings, moving from capex to opex,” he adds. “Instead of needing third-party support, it provides sufficient control to do what we want to do.”
For the rest of the firm, the biggest improvement related to RingCentral is that employees can now work from anywhere. “People are not tethered to their desks, and they are absolutely more efficient,” Lam says. “They could be working from home or meeting clients where the clients want to meet. And everything is recorded centrally.”
RingCentral gives us a lot of control, and we have seen significant cost savings, moving from capex to opex. Instead of needing third-party support, it provides sufficient control to do what we want to do.
Sean Lam
Group Managing Director, COO, CTO, Walker Crips