Meet the Team: Nick Garland

Making useable and actionable insights from information and data is how HUB24’s Head of Architecture Nick Garland defines innovation in wealth management.

He likens this work to how the Internet revolutionised information sharing in the 1990s – transforming how people used and engaged with data and opening up new possibilities and opportunities.

“I think about how we can use innovation to drive down costs, to drive efficiencies and how we can use innovation to work with new regulations,” explains Nick. “Ultimately, it is a question of how we can use innovation to best drive the client and adviser experience.”

Love at first sight

Living on the northern beaches in Sydney, Nick loves being in the water whenever he can. He joined the Circular Quay office of HUB24 in March 2017, commencing his current role last year.

The move to HUB24 came after a decade of working in a fintech which he co-founded. Following a year of travel around Australia and two years at Fortnum Private Wealth where he managed the transition from its internal platform to HUB24, he joined HUB24.

“It’s the best career move of my life,” says Nick. “HUB24 has a really good culture about it and everyone just wants to get on with it. Its not often that people put barriers in your way. People just want to resolve things and move forwards.”

HUB24’s architecture team of five is spread across Australia. All with engineering backgrounds, (Nick is a telecommunications engineer) they work with business teams to set tech strategy which covers the HUB24 Platform, Agility connect, HUBconnect, mobile apps, managing data and our IT infrastructure (servers, networks, telephony and productivity tools like Office365).

Nick’s teams work brings together both tech strategy and facilitation.  So, for a project where data is being moved off the platform to Google cloud, his team coordinates all the work to do this from data security and privacy to then moving the work through to the developers to make it happen.

Innovation in practice

“We often say, ‘find a way’ and culturally I think that’s been really important to the success of HUB24. I also enjoy the people – they’re good humans.”

Innovation manifests itself at HUB24 through this desire to find a way and given this, he said there is pockets of innovation all through the business, not just in the technology group.

Recent examples of innovation within the group include:

• the launch of HUBConnect,
• the work which is being done to improve the platform’s account opening functionality,
• the adoption of digital signatures within the group,
• the development of further AgilityConnect Flow workflows and
• the platform operations team experimenting with co-browsing technologies to better support our customers.

What is HUB24’s experience of this innovation? Nick says this is often through the lenses of user expectations and how they currently interact with it.

“One of the challenges wealth management has is that our customers are using so many tools which are driving user expectations on what tech can do. Our customers are experiencing that on one hand, but for our advisers, life is tough out there – they have to do more work now than what they did 20 years ago and margins are compressing.”

Staying on top of trends is an important part of what Nick does, something he both enjoys and actively seeks out.

“I read a lot in the wealth management industry and in tech industry. I could do that all day. Things are moving so fast every day. I spend a lot of times researching trends.”

Project highlights

In Nick’s line of work, success is discussed in the context of project highlights, which include redesign work to ensure the platform continues to perform as accounts and trading volumes increase. Nick said HUB24 always has had the foresight to continue to test the platform and innovate, even in calm waters.

“The real test was in March when the pandemic restrictions came in – trading on platforms went through the roof – and our systems adjusted and supported the needs of advisers.”

More recent project highlights include streamlining the onboarding of accounts on the platform and working with Aberdeen Standard on the bionic advice project.

“Part of my role is to control the chaos. Engineers are inquisitive beings and want to use latest and greatest technology but as a group we must have consistency in what we are doing to ensure we can support these technology assets in the future. Part of what we do is setting the standards to get this balance right. “