Head in the Clouds: Impax COO Darren Johnson

As a result, Johnson says, Impax can focus on what it does best—making money for its clients—and leave infrastructure concerns to the IT experts at other organizations.

Confronting Vendor Lock-In
One of the disadvantages of depending on the cloud extensively is that it can lead to an overreliance on third-party service providers, which can hamper flexibility. As such, Johnson calls for increased data transparency from the vendor community and continued improvement in terms of functionality.

“I think vendors should continue investing in the cloud, and continue working on data management and ways to cleanse and store data properly,” he says. “There’s still room for innovation and there’s still more that needs to be done and can be done, so I want them to keep investing and trying to deliver what clients need, to really communicate with the industry. That would be good.”

Impax’s reliance on its service providers was never more apparent than when Hurricane Sandy struck last fall, although in that instance, Johnson says he was glad of the firm’s dependence.

“The problem is that if it happened here in our offices—if we had this big storm—and if we didn’t have robust, hosted solutions with frequently tested disaster recovery processes, I don’t know how we would cope,” he says. “We may be down for a number of hours, but I think any cloud provider is working on their disaster recovery. Microsoft has file servers around the world that replicate to each other, which is something we could never hope to achieve at Impax, given the size of our firm. We just wouldn’t do it, so it’s great to have an enterprise solution for a small to mid-sized business like ours.”

The Road Ahead
Regulation continues to dictate the way forward for financial institutions, and Impax is no different, according to Johnson, who highlights the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (Fatca) and Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD) as of greatest concern. “Everyone you talk to is going to say that regulation is one of the biggest challenges, and it is going to be a massive challenge for us,” he says. “It doesn’t help that the AIFMD level-two text is not yet finalized.* We have to do something, but we’re not sure what, and we’re worried about how our systems are going to cope with it and how we are going to manage the process. Regulation is a challenge and I believe that’s going to be an ongoing theme for this year, next year, and the years to come.”