Keys AM (for "Asset Management") is an atypical player in its sector. In addition to the rather traditional business of real estate asset management, Keys AM combines a strategy of innovation, in start-up mode. With a vision focused on the power of digital and its impact on all aspects of real estate. It is therefore logical that digital is at the heart of the company's organization. To fully understand the issues at stake, we asked Christophe Ferrer, its IT Director, to talk to us about the place of technical projects and their strategic dimension.
Can you tell us about Keys AM and how it has evolved since its inception?
Christophe Ferrer: "Keys AM is a young company since we were born in 2011, and we are growing very fast. For example, we have doubled our fundraising in the last 2 years, as well as the number of employees in all areas. I personally arrived 2 years ago when the need arose to structure the company from the point of view of its back office. It was a question of making this growth possible and enabling the employees to be both innovative and efficient.
We work with professionals who have one thing in common: they are used to evolving in a digital world and are demanding in terms of the speed of reaction we must have. We must therefore be able to be agile, while remaining very scrupulous about security, because we operate in highly regulated markets. highly regulated markets.
What is the role of digital in the group's strategy?
- Fund data for our investor-clients. It is mainly consolidated on Salesforce and managed by the teams.
- Data focused on real estate: signing of leases, data on the asset itself (associated contracts, etc.). This is data that must always be accessible and that is consolidated via interconnected systems. It is on this highly strategic part that Blue Soft intervenes.
Unlike older players, for us digital is not a transformation issue: we integrated it right away and organized our information system so that it is as digital as possible. In concrete terms, this translates into a paperless strategy and a high level of employee mobility. We work a lot from a distance. Our offices are based in Luxembourg, Paris and Monaco and our sales staff are deployed throughout France. We are often in a telecommuting or coworking situation. We are not yet in "flex office" mode, but we are getting closer to it in many ways.
What is the place of the project on which Blue Soft intervenes in this strategy?
"The role of Blue Soft is particularly important and directly linked to the group's ambition. Blue Soft acts on 3 fundamental aspects of the business: data collection, consolidation and security. We use a market ERP, Yardi, specialized in asset management. But given our innovative dimension, we have a lot of data that does not fit into the boxes of this tool. We then created with Blue Soft the repository of these additional data, the storage and security strategy. On this last point in particular, we were very fussy and Blue Soft was able to meet all the requirements with regard to the AMF and the RGPD.
In order to consolidate these atypical data with those of Yardi, Blue Soft has created a unique repository on a tool with an interface for the employees, in the form of an application.
The solution thus developed and its API mode allowed us to open up this service, to make it available to other editors and to connect it to other internal tools for data transfer. Most of our departments, sales, marketing, etc. rely on a reliable tool and information available in real time, by all those who are authorized to have access to it
We now have a complete and scalable digital system that we can share. For example, we work with Harvest, which is a publisher for wealth management advisors. Thanks to our repository and our APIs, we can provide them with complete and instantaneous information.
This is one of Keys AM's strengths. We innovate a lot on what surrounds our offer, in terms of services. The accessibility of information is an important criterion, and our tool has become a digital asset that we share. It is now a development argument towards the outside world. With the help of Blue Soft, we have equipped ourselves with tools that allow us to respond to the growing desire of customers and partners for instantaneousness and reliability, " explains Christophe Ferrer.
Why did you choose Blue Soft to accompany you on such strategic elements?
" The IT team is reduced to 2 employees in the company. Even though we are experiencing very strong growth, internalizing our developments did not make sense. So we interviewed several service companies. We had several proposals for "traditional" contracts, in management mode, with identified positions. The Agility As a Service proposal from Blue Soft was different: it handled the request in agile mode, from its service center, providing us with specific skills for this or that aspect of the project.
This is a clear advantage of the service center: the availability of several experts, on different technologies, with very strong specialists in their field. The service center can call on different resources at the right time.
For our part, we needed responsiveness and specialized expertise (especially in security). We wanted to implement a technical architecture that was "up to date", scalable, flexible but also robust and requiring specific expertise.
In this respect, Blue Soft 's proposal was very appropriate: evolution, adaptability, effectiveness... Everything fits together to be able to respond quickly to the needs of our investor clients and our internal clients. Keys AM is dynamic and fast, the information system must be too.
From the point of view of day-to-day relations, the service center is remote and operates in agile mode. The various projects are monitored according to these methods and this is also why we chose Blue Soft. This allows us to have deliverables very quickly and flexibility on the evolution of business needs. With this collaboration, we are able to react and maximize the value of the deliverable and make a quick return to the expectations of employees and customers.
Blue Soft is our only partner on this project. On the one hand because we needed unity in the project and on the other hand because we find all the required skills at Blue Soft . We have been working together since the beginning of 2018, for an average volume of 30 to 50 man-days. The project is managed very well remotely, the batches are delivered on time and I estimate that compared to the "régie" mode we have saved 2 to 3 times more time on the initial scope. So we are very satisfied, both technically and on the customer side ," concludes Christophe Ferrer.
Your organization is going digital and you need support for your transformation strategy? Contact our experts for a personalized consultation!
