Monterone Partners LLP is a European equity-focused hedge fund based in London. It is a small firm with only eight employees and no internal CTO or IT team, yet it operates under the oversight of both the SEC and the FCA, with stringent regulatory and resiliency requirements. Since 2015 it has outsourced its foundational IT infrastructure and security needs to Thrive, which it first engaged while building its first infrastructure.

As a small London hedge fund with eight employees and no internal CTO, Monterone Partners needed more support than it could provide itself to manage its IT infrastructure and compliance. The firm was building its first infrastructure and wanted something that would last: future-proof, compliant with the regulatory and resiliency requirements set by the FCA and SEC, and backed by a reliable partner for the long haul.

The firm was not chasing the latest technology. It needed a rock-solid, well-supported system that could handle all of its needs without complications, while remaining cost-efficient. Regulatory demands were also set to intensify over time, and SEC and FCA audits would require the firm to store communications securely and reconstitute them easily.

Getting the choice right mattered. As COO Phillip Chapple put it, “Switching providers is a big deal for a firm our size—it’s disruptive and costly—so we had to get it right from the start.” Downtime in trading operations could be detrimental, so resilience was non-negotiable.

Monterone selected Thrive, then known as Edge, for its deep expertise in alternative investments and hedge funds and its proven track record with more complex firms. Thrive designed and implemented a solution tailored to the firm and, because Monterone had no internal CTO, managed the transition end to end, from coordinating with providers to handling licensing and installation.

Thrive sourced and installed all the necessary hardware, including printers, firewalls, switches and wiring, and configured the Wi-Fi and internal networks. It set up Monterone’s private cloud infrastructure, a choice shaped by a regulatory landscape in which public cloud solutions were still met with some hesitation, and managed the piping and point-to-point connections to the data centres.

Today Thrive provides hybrid cloud hosted IT infrastructure, managed firewalls, managed zero trust, endpoint security and response, disaster recovery and DRaaS, dark web monitoring, a secure DNS gateway, advanced email threat security and vulnerability scanning. Thrive keeps the firm’s operations resilient and compliant with SEC and FCA regulations, and its proactive approach means potential issues are triaged, and backups or failovers engaged, often before the firm is aware of a problem.

• Nine years of continuous partnership since 2015, with only one significant downtime incident, promptly addressed.
• Ongoing compliance with SEC and FCA regulations, including secure storage and easy reconstitution of communications for audits.
• Lower costs for the internal IT teams, equipment and full-time staff otherwise needed to manage systems and data centres.
• Proactive monitoring: Thrive often switches to backups or failovers before the firm notices an issue.
• Products that evolve with the firm’s needs, keeping it ahead of industry standards without major overhauls.