St. James’s Place Wealth Management accelerates innovation with ServiceNow

Technology Services team allows staff to focus on long-term, face-to-face relationships with customers
As a FTSE-100 wealth management business, St. James’s Place Wealth Management puts long-term relationships at the centre of everything it does. The business, which manages more than £103.5bn of client funds, believes in a face-to-face approach, offering trusted financial advice and services.

The Technology Services team at St. James’s Place plays a pivotal role in the business by supporting its 2,000 employees, 2,000+ third party staff, and its vast network of 10,000 partners and staff, who manage clients’ wealth portfolios. When critical partner and client business systems are running smoothly, teams are freed up to focus on long-term, face-to-face relationships.

Yet, supporting the technology systems was becoming too challenging. As Tari Dogra, Head of Division – IT Service Management at St. James’s Place Wealth Management, explains, “We had an end-of-life IT service management system with limited functionality that we couldn’t keep up to date.”

St. James’s Place streamlines its service desk by introducing a self-service portal
Tari was tasked with building a completely new IT service management function for St. James’s Place and seized the opportunity to do things differently.

A full review of the technology landscape made ServiceNow the clear choice, with an interface and user experience that Tari knew would be easily adopted by the Technology Services team.

“ServiceNow fits perfectly with our cloud-first policy, giving us the flexibility and scalability that we need. The configuration capability is second to none and with full ITIL support we are confident we are following good practice in service delivery,” says Tari.

Since the deployment of the Now Platform^®, St. James’s Place has moved from running only two processes—incident and change management—to delivering full IT service management that has expanded to problems and requests. For Tari and his team, it’s been a transformation in approach.

“Prior to ServiceNow, everything was classed as an incident, so moving these through the service desk to triage was time-consuming and complex,” explains Tari. “Using ServiceNow, we can accurately classify all of the requests using ServiceNow’s digital workflows to route these efficiently to the right teams.”

The St. James’s Place IT service team is now handling an average of 12,000 incidents a month, and employees and partners can self-serve using the online service portal to ask for hardware, software, or to submit enhancement forms for business services.

“ServiceNow has delivered a platform for service management that is an enabler for our employees and partners to have meaningful interactions with our clients. Our people can focus on our core commitment of driving the best possible outcomes, in resolving issues as efficiently as possible,” adds Tari.

ServiceNow brings real-time insights to the full IT service management operation
In the past, the Technology Services team suffered from poor visibility of incidents and a lack of real-time overview of the volume of work. After streamlining and automating problem, incident, and change management with the help of digital workflows, the team has a full overview of queries through one single dashboard.

Workloads, resources, and the progress of queries are all managed and monitored centrally, with reports generated automatically according to a pre-defined schedule.

“Our time has been freed up to focus on collaboration and meaningful conversations based on real-time insights,” says Tari. “At our fortnightly internal problem management forum, we discuss the impact of the problems raised and how we can resolve them.”

Creating a new employee experience with ServiceNow digital workflows
The implementation of the new platform has had a positive impact on the employee experience, particularly with bringing in a single toolset for the Technology Services and business teams to use. Working lives are easier and employees now feel empowered to support the business expansion of St. James’s Place.

Tari’s team has moved away from siloed tasks to a much more shared approach. Previously, spreadsheets were used for tracking problem records, hindering collaborative working and taking weeks to update, share, and analyse. Now, there is now a single platform as the foundation of all knowledge and information-sharing.

“Change is always questioned, but with ServiceNow we had the right answers,” says Tari. “Moving to dynamic digital workflows completely transformed the Technology Services and business teams work-boosting productivity, engagement, and motivation. Rather than discuss frustrations, employees talk about the work being done with ServiceNow in a creative and highly productive way.”

St. James’s Place creates a platform for continuous development and innovation
The ability to set up and deploy changes and new services with minimal disruption has improved service relationships at St. James’s Place. New features can be switched on quickly and reliably, enabling St. James’s Place to improve its services in an agile way.

For example, an application built and deployed on the platform in just three days has transformed the client services feedback process. “In a matter of weeks, we can bring together all client feedback onto the Now Platform and use digital workflows to drive appropriate actions across the business,” explains Tari. “The biggest impact is the visibility this gives our leadership team. In one view, they can see how the business is responding rapidly to client concerns, requests, and ideas.”

St. James’s Place embarks on a long-term journey of transformation with ServiceNow
It is not only the Technology Services teams that have positive feedback on the new platform. Employees within the business are seeing the benefits first-hand and are actively promoting the value to other parts of the organisation.

Tari’s team is now looking to take its IT service management maturity to the next level, by creating a configuration management database (CMDB) on the platform and extending digital workflows to include asset management and configuration management.

The ERP, partnership support, CRM investment management teams, and others will continue to benefit from digital workflows running on the Now Platform and demand from the business will drive further digital transformation.

“We have a growing number of people in the business who want some of the magic created by ServiceNow for their department or business process. We are just starting to unlock the potential of an incredibly powerful platform. There is so much more we can achieve with ServiceNow in the future,” concludes Tari.    

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