As our valued client, you know your Advisor well, but at Telarray, we have many skilled professionals who work behind the scenes, helping build your financial future.
Today you’ll meet Mike Cochran, Telarray’s VP of Technology.
What does your department do?
I handle everything involving our technology, whether it’s solving a problem with a printer, to maintaining the security of our data and our systems, to writing custom software and code, to maintaining and updating our Observatory tool with input from the firm’s leaders.
How did the pandemic reshape your work?
Before the pandemic, we were heavily focused on a shift to secure cloud hosting for everything from our file storage to our emails. Even our phone system is cloud-hosted across multiple redundant datacenters. We were finishing up that transition just as the pandemic hit. Our goal was to be sure that, no matter what happened, we could always operate and clients could always reach us. I’m happy to say that we met that goal.
Now that we have a solid technology foundation that works well and that everyone is accustomed to using, we’re focusing on improving our capabilities, including automation and custom software development, all with the goal of redundancy and resilience for our clients.
What would your clients be surprised to know about your department?
Well, very few firms like ours have custom software that was developed in-house to solve specific problems. For example, right now we’re integrating our disparate systems using custom code so that data flows cleanly and we can track it along the way. We’re talking directly to our partners and vendors to develop our tracking and integration capabilities.
What’s on the horizon for your department?
I have been working recently on automating a lot of our processes. For example, each morning our reporting team receives a report that pulls data from multiple systems which helps them monitor for anomalies and speeds up the data reconciliation process. We’re trying to expand on automations, which should further increase our ability to detect anomalies in accounts, and just overall be able to provide a better service to clients.
