How Key Group cut incidents x5 by modernising on Microsoft

Key results 

What happens when a financial services business outgrows its own infrastructure? 

For several years, Key Group had operated what Jack Neary, Group Technology Director, describes as a pick-and-mix technology strategy: a large number of suppliers, a wide spread of technologies and the significant overhead of managing both across a fast-moving financial services business. The estate had grown organically alongside the company, which is rarely a problem in isolation, but at the time Key Group decided to act, the costs and the constraints had become difficult to ignore. Beyond the two headline problems of cost unpredictability and provisioning speed, the multi-supplier model itself had become a liability: no single point of accountability, no combined innovation, and a supplier management overhead that consumed time the technology team could not afford to spend. 

Two issues had reached a point of urgency. The first was cost unpredictability: bills arrived that were genuinely difficult to model, and pricing any new service or proposition was slow, approximate and often wrong. For a VC-backed business on a deliberate growth trajectory, that kind of commercial opacity around technology spend creates real problems when investment decisions need to be made quickly. The second issue was speed: provisioning new environments was taking weeks, sometimes longer, which meant the product and innovation teams were working at a pace the infrastructure simply could not match. 

Underpinning both was a strategic decision that Key Group had already made: to consolidate fully on the Microsoft ecosystem and use it as the platform for everything the business wanted to build next, including an increasingly ambitious AI agenda. What they needed was a partner who had not just theoretical Microsoft credentials but demonstrable, audited depth across that ecosystem, combined with the scale and methodology to take on the complexity of a transition without exposing the business to disruption. 

What should a financial services organisation actually look for in a managed services partner? 

The evaluation process was structured and deliberate. Key Group ran an RFI that assessed the field across technical credentials, methodology and strategic fit, and while the field was broad, a few things separated Version 1 from the rest fairly quickly. 

The ASPIRE Managed Services Framework was the most visible differentiator. A significant number of providers in the market claim to have a delivery methodology; what impressed Key Group was that Version 1’s was documented, embedded in day-to-day operations and clearly audited, not a set of slide decks but an actual operating model with a run book behind it. Alongside that, Version 1’s depth across the Microsoft estate was measurable: the highest number of certified individuals of any provider evaluated, Azure Expert MSP accreditation, and familiarity with the newer certifications that Key Group knew would matter as AI moved from roadmap item to live capability.

What also built confidence was something that happened before the contract was signed. During the RFI process itself, Version 1 identified licensing and pricing optimisation opportunities that Key Group had been missing, practical value delivered in good faith before any commercial relationship existed. That combination of credentials and demonstrated intent made the decision straightforward. 

How do you transition a managed service in financial services without disrupting the business? 

In financial services, the transition from one managed service provider to another is one of the highest-risk moments any technology leader will manage. Regulators and customers have zero tolerance for disruption, and a difficult transition can undermine confidence in a new partner long before the relationship has had a chance to prove itself. Key Group’s stated goal going into the transition was clear: that nobody inside the business would know it had happened. 

They achieved it. The transition completed without any business impact, downtime or disruption, and within the first 12 months Key Group completed a second transition, bringing the AVD (Azure Virtual Desktop) managed service across to Version 1 with the same outcome. Two successful transitions in year one, both invisible to the wider business, is a meaningful proof point in any managed services conversation. 

The transition period also marked the start of the continuous improvement cycle. Version 1’s six-phase transition methodology includes an initial well-architected review of the environment, which generates a Continual Service Improvement log, a live record of issues, optimisation opportunities and technical debt items that becomes the operational backlog for the months that follow. The incident reduction that Key Group experienced in the first six months did not happen by accident; it was the direct result of that systematic approach to identifying and removing the root causes of recurring problems. 

What does a well-run managed service actually change for a financial services technology team? 

The most significant change in the first year was not a technology upgrade or a cost saving. It was a reallocation of attention. Before the transition, Key Group’s technology team had spent the better part of three years running a largely IT-change-focused programme: technical debt remediation, data centre migration, infrastructure upgrades. The infrastructure was consuming the team. Following the transition, it stopped doing that. 

Incident volumes tell the clearest version of that story. From double digits per month under the previous provider to low single digits, and by Q1 of the current year, under ten incidents for the entire quarter. The combination of proactive monitoring, AI-assisted incident analysis and the CSI log working through root causes meant that problems stopped recurring rather than being managed repeatedly. For a technology team in a growth company, that shift in operating tempo, from firefighting to building, is the outcome that everything else depends on. 

The commercial clarity that Key Group wanted has also materialised: every bill has been exactly as quoted, which Neary describes as new territory, and in the current market environment, a genuinely predictable cost base changes how quickly investment decisions can be made. Consolidating from multiple suppliers to a single strategic partner has also removed a layer of complexity that is easy to underestimate: the overhead of managing multiple vendor relationships, accountability gaps between providers, and the absence of any combined innovation across the estate. With Version 1 as the single point of accountability, that overhead has gone. New environments that previously took months to provision are now delivered in approximately four weeks, and the speed improvement across broader time-to-market activity is running at roughly three times faster than the previous model allowed. 

The scope of the partnership has expanded as confidence has grown. Version 1 has delivered Copilot enablement workshops for Key Group’s end users, supported a significant mortgage origination platform upgrade, run a structured AI opportunity assessment through Version 1’s AI Co-Creation process that has identified two near-term initiatives, and provided technology market analysis that has helped Key Group’s leadership team stress-test its roadmap. The AI Co-Creation process combines a structured discovery workshop with a rapid prototyping hackathon, using AI expert avatars and live prototyping tools to move from business challenge to working prototype in one to two days, rather than months of planning cycles. 

How should a financial services business be using its managed services partner to prepare for AI?

Key Group’s direction from here is clear. The strategy is to consolidate fully on the Microsoft ecosystem, get all data into a single governed place accessible to the Microsoft AI suite, and build customer and broker experiences on top of that platform through Dynamics and Power Platform. It is an ambitious programme for any financial services business, and it depends entirely on having an infrastructure layer that is stable, optimised and capable of evolving quickly as requirements change. 

The pipeline of activity already in discussion spans AI implementation, data platform consolidation and continued infrastructure optimisation. The foundational question, how to stop infrastructure from being the bottleneck, has been resolved. Key Group is now building on top of it.