We have been investing strategically in our core technology infrastructure to provide even faster and more stable platforms for our investment managers and staff. We continue to benchmark ourselves to global best practices and use third party experts to help prepare for future technology step changes.

There are four key aspects to this initiative:

• Automating the monitoring of our production IT services to minimise outages. Modern computers can often predict failures (similar to a car dashboard telling you when it will be time for the next service). We have used these facilities to reduce both the number and duration of failures.
• Upgrading the technical platforms for our e-commerce, AHL trading and other major systems to take advantage of improvements to processing power and data handling facilities.
• Extending our well-established video conferencing facilities to all offices globally. Usage has more than doubled in the past year, enabling us to collaborate effectively across the globe while reducing travel costs and our carbon footprint.
• Re-enforcing best practice processes for incident handling, change control and disaster recovery testing.

We have also continued our focus on information security, reflecting the fact that much of our business is based on electronic assets and data. We have a team of e-commerce and other security experts who continuously update our technical security measures, enabling us to:

• Apply security 'patches' on a timely basis.
• Upgrade our multi-level security and fraud protection mechanisms.
• Conduct regular penetration tests of our internet security.

03 Creating a scalable global platform to support our new integrated hedge fund business

Whilst we are still in the early stages of forming our integrated hedge fund management business, we have already created a blueprint for a consolidated IT operating platform across the multi-manager businesses to enhance operational efficiency and leverage existing capabilities. This blueprint is based on extending the existing RMF suite of applications to work more globally, to handle a wider range of products, and to automate more elements of the business processes (from multi strategy investment management to the associated accounting and portfolio rebalance activities). It will also build out our existing managed account platform facilities. To minimise the delivery risk often seen with large scale IT projects, we have broken the work into several stages. The first two stages have been delivered:

• Migrate RMF's fund accounting onto a leading industry third party package (Hedgesphere).
• Extend support for FX (foreign exchange) functionality.

In parallel, much work has been undertaken to make our data more consistent on a global basis, so helping standardise business processes and simplify reporting. This work is ongoing and will extend to build out the next generation of tools to enhance investment decision making.