A day in the life of: Mark Sampey

Today, I'm off to the south west of England to meet with a potential client about our Harbour suitability and risk profiling solution. This is actually my third visit to this firm of wealth managers and will involve a more detailed discussion around how Harbour will deliver the business process controls that they require.

Having reviewed a number of other risk profiling solutions on the market, the key thing that attracted them to Harbour was its flexibility to be configured to deliver a wealth manager's own choice of risk and suitability questions. They've invested a lot of time and effort in developing a risk profiling and suitability questionnaire to suit their needs and today we're exploring how we can accommodate that within Harbour.

Given that we're now into the nitty gritty of technical details, I'm taking Jenni Allen, our solutions architect, along to the meeting. We're travelling separately (me by car from the Midlands, Jenni by train from Liverpool) as, believe it or not, it's a lot less hassle and far cheaper this way!

Thankfully neither of us are held up and meet as planned about an hour before the meeting - just time to grab a coffee and finalise our plan of action. Then it's off to the client's office, where they've very kindly laid on lunch for us. A welcome sight after nearly three hours travelling!

We spend the next two hours discussing how Harbour can be configured and as there are several people around the table who haven't seen Harbour in action yet, I run through a demo. Like so many others, they're impressed by its ease of use and can see immediately just how it could benefit their business.

By the end of the meeting, we agree the next step is to carry out a more formal scoping exercise. This will cover assessing how we will integrate their multiple choice questionnaire within Harbour, as well as defining the scoring mechanism, client profiles and investment strategies. Not to mention all of the associated documentation we'll need to include (T's & C's, application forms etc.). While there's still quite a way to go before finalising the deal, we end the day on a really positive note. It's been well worth the long trip.

I drop Jenni at the station to catch her train and head off to do battle with the motorway traffic. Thankfully though, it's not as bad as I'd feared today, and I make it back home in a reasonable time. There's just time to catch up on some emails and call the office to review progress with a few other projects before everyone heads off for the evening.