Close Brothers gains agility and streamlines IT effort by switching to Windows 365

Close Brothers is a leading UK merchant banking group. Founded in 1878, the business provides lending, takes deposits, manages wealth and trades in securities with the mission of helping the UK’s people and businesses thrive over the long term. First listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1984, Close Brothers now employs 3,500 UK staff.

Technical debt is a brake on agility

“Like many financial services institutions, we carried a huge amount of technical debt,” explains Michael Hinton, Chief Infrastructure & Technology Officer at Close Brothers. “We knew we needed to modernise to improve the experience for our customers and deliver improved value to the business.”

The imperative to modernise intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. The need to support bank-wide remote and hybrid working exposed how unfit for purpose incumbent systems were.

In the immediate urgency, the bank replaced its cumbersome, legacy remote desktop solution with a cloud-based remote desktop solution from a major cloud provider. Although this improved the user experience, it came with a heavy burden of infrastructure and administration for the internal IT team tasked with setting it up and rolling it out. Close Brothers felt a better solution could still be found.

Choosing Windows 11 and Windows 365

Michael Hinton explains, “We wanted to modernise our estate, reduce our support overheads, reduce the number of our IT operations, and make it easier to offshore services while providing the same look and feel to our external partners.”

The team realised that combining a move to Windows 11 with a switch to Windows 365 – to securely stream users’ Windows experience, including personalised apps, content, and settings, from the Microsoft Cloud to any device – would enable the bank to achieve the benefits it sought.

“As well as delivering a lot of technology benefits, we would be putting the foundations in place for larger transformation across the bank,” states Michael Hinton.

IT administrative effort is streamlined

“One of the first benefits we experienced was an almost zero-touch deployment with Microsoft, through our use of Microsoft Intune,” reports Gareth Johnson, Infrastructure & Cloud Architect at Close Brothers banking division. “Our Windows 365 solution connects with Intune and it inherits all our prework for Windows 11. We added only one additional policy – it was that simple. That is a huge contrast to either of the alternatives.”

Sarah Clarke, Head of the Service Centre for Close Brothers banking division, adds, “We recently rolled out our remote desktops for 500 users at a managed service partner. That’s something we couldn’t have done with our previous solution. It would have taken us two or three days to set up a single instance. Now, it’s moments to onboard hundreds of users.”

A cultural shift: from reactive to proactive

The previous remote desktop app had required two full-time engineers dedicated to maintaining the environment. Because this is no longer necessary, their time can be dedicated to more proactive and value-adding IT work.

Gareth Johnson estimates that Close Brothers has saved the equivalent of the workload of another full-time engineer by the shift to automatic patching and updates. “We used to have a manual patch Tuesday. Now, nobody touches anything. It’s all automatic, driven by Microsoft Intune.”

Sarah Clarke agrees, “We’ve been able to switch from low-level support tasks to value-adding activities. We now have the capacity to establish a team to proactively consult with our colleagues in different lines of business to help identify and solve their problems.” 

A better user experience

It isn’t only the IT team who are feeling the benefits. Previously, users could spend anything from five minutes to half an hour attempting to login to their remote desktops. When they did, they often complained about performance, with many applications lagging and some heavier applications, like web meetings and spreadsheets, crashing.

“It has transformed how we work,” states Sarah Clarke. “We’ve seen an 80 percent drop in tickets about performance issues.”

“This simple improvement to performance has delivered a regular productivity gain to the business,” agrees Michael Hinton. “Five minutes per day, for three thousand users, every day – it adds up!”

The improved productivity that comes from happier users and improved morale is harder to calculate but no less real.

Empowering users through self-service options

Close Brothers users are delighted with the new way of working. “When we first started, we had to recruit people to make the switch,” recalls Sarah Clarke. “After a few months, people were coming to us to ask to be next.”

The team chose to migrate users on a department-by-department basis. This enabled them to preapprove and configure the key business apps used by each line of business before it migrated. The team uses the self-service portals in Microsoft Entra ID to enable users to request additional apps that aren’t part of the standard build.

“Having preapproved business apps available through a self-service portal has enabled us to reduce the number of support tickets raised for software requests by half,” Sarah Clarke reports. “And we’re expecting the remaining 50 percent to further reduce.”

As well as reducing another burden on the IT team, the change has significantly enhanced the user experience. “Business users can try new tools without worry,” Sarah Clarke explains.

“We’re also using the secure self-service password reset,” adds Gareth Johnson. “There’s less friction for users and less work for us.”

Investing in Microsoft Surface

Understanding Microsoft Surface is the best way to experience Microsoft solutions, Close Brothers has rolled out Surface devices for all its users – further boosting internal IT satisfaction ratings.

“There’s been a performance uplift,” reports Sarah Clarke. “People are proud to carry the Surface devices. They love the touchscreens and the premium feel. They have confidence going into a meeting that their tech will work.”

“We’ve silenced the complaints that the tech is old and it isn’t working for users,” she continues. “Everything works. And Windows Hello is a big hit.”

Because the users are no longer waiting for their desktops to load, they are happy to shut off their laptops when not in use. As well as reducing energy consumption, this answers a residual security concern. “We had to manually push users to switch off their machines so updates could be installed,” Sarah Clarke explains. “By closing that user-created vulnerability, we are more secure.” 

A story of compounding benefits

“We’re consolidating on Microsoft solutions, with Microsoft Surface, Windows 11, Windows 365, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Entra ID. It’s all joined up and that compounds the benefits,” says Gareth Johnson. “We now have holistic visibility to see the health of all of our machines, we can assess overall performance, identify the apps that are causing problems for users… that just wasn’t possible before.”

As a result, the business has been able to displace a large number of third-party applications. These functions are now delivered by existing Microsoft tools, eliminating all the overheads, support and updates required to run those third-party applications.

“We’ve swapped out solutions for data loss prevention, SIEM, disk encryption, multi-factor authentication. That’s all now Microsoft,” explains Gareth Johnson. “We no longer have to worry about maintaining and updating those third-party apps. Choosing Microsoft has enabled us to significantly simplify our IT estate.”

With a more integrated approach, the potential for vulnerabilities creeping in has greatly reduced. Michael Hinton states, “The move to Microsoft has substantially enhanced our security posture for the bank.”

A roadmap freed from earlier constraints

The switch to Windows 11 and Windows 365 has already enabled Close Brothers to move more than a third of its datacentre capacity to the Microsoft Cloud. Ten percent of these machines, those used for managing the associated on-premises service, were decommissioned entirely.

Now the focus is on moving to a broader transformation agenda which is dedicated to delivering business change and moving the rest of the on-premises workloads to Microsoft Azure.

Gareth Johnson explains, “We can now move quickly to adopt new features – half now automatically flow directly to users. We can easily adopt the best of the rest – such as Microsoft Copilot – without lots of work internally to deliver it.”

“We’ve future-proofed our desktop environment,” confirms Michael Hinton. “The next stage is a larger transformation to remove complexity from our business apps estate. We want to take a product-based approach and map viable apps to SaaS alternatives where the extra cost of running proprietary apps does not add value to our business. For the 20 percent that do drive value, we’ll use our data portals, CI/CD pipelines, automation and AI where possible. It will be hard work but it is exciting. We are looking forward to it.”