Leading UK financial services provider Quilter innovates to drive performance improvements, enhance customer experience, and deliver on ambitious efficiency targets while sustaining growth.
Quilter identified Microsoft 365 Copilot as a key tool to help empower its teams to do more.
Amongst the measurable efficiency gains achieved, Quilter estimates Copilot will save 13,000+ hours per month of post-call admin time for its most expensive staff.
“Copilot is about empowering employees to think differently and be more effective.”
Jeremy Mugridge, Marketing Director, Quilter
Quilter is a leading financial services company headquartered in the United Kingdom, renowned for its comprehensive wealth management solutions. The Quilter team was eager to explore what AI and, in particular, generative AI, could deliver for the business, its people, its operations, and its clients and began exploring Microsoft Copilot.
“There is a lot of curiosity surrounding AI and we wanted to explore whether it could truly deliver tangible value for us,” recalls David Reynolds, Group Chief Information Officer at Quilter.
Working with Microsoft was a natural choice, not least because Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams are integral to Quilter’s daily operations. The longstanding partnership and the security and data integrity benefits also focused the team’s attention on Microsoft 365 Copilot.
For Quilter, safeguarding client data and maintaining trust are paramount. The business needed to be satisfied that security and data integrity could be assured before integrating any AI solution into its operations.
David Reynolds explains, “Copilot is heavily integrated into the whole Microsoft product suite and, of course, when a product is simple and well-integrated, we will be more interested in delivering it. There is less cost and effort on our side; it costs us less to administer the whole estate. But for me, the most important aspect is the security and granularity of control.”
“With Microsoft, we know that our data remains in our control, that has been really positive for us,” David Reynolds adds. “Copilot offers a secure platform. Microsoft’s robust data protection policies and the assurances it provides regarding data privacy are key factors in our decision to use Copilot.”
Leveraging Microsoft’s Early Adoption Programme, Quilter rolled out the integration in phases, beginning with the technology department.
Alex Krupa, Head of Audit at Quilter, elaborates: “We mapped AI to our internal audit lifecycle as a part of our transformation journey. Our aim was to enhance operational efficiency, reduce manual workloads, and improve the overall quality of our services through leveraging automation. We wanted to save time but primarily increase the quality of our processes—AI enables our work to be undertaken across fuller data sets or on unstructured data, improving the quality of our deliverables and therefore the value we provide to our stakeholders.”
Licences were swapped frequently across the department so that many people had an opportunity to experiment with Copilot during the pilot phase. This was extended to include marketing, investment, legal, HR, and finance teams.
“We distributed the licences and asked the teams to really play around with the tools,” explains Alex Krupa. “We gave everyone 20 or 30 suggestions for potential ways to use Copilot, but also encouraged everyone to think about how they could integrate Copilot into their professional lives in ways we perhaps wouldn’t have thought of.”
Quilter adopted an approach that gave individuals the flexibility to innovate. Dedicated Microsoft Teams channels enabled people to share their experiences, tips, and tricks. Quilter leant into the support from Microsoft to provide targeting training sessions.
“The support Microsoft gave us was really, really helpful,” says Stephen Curd, Investment Lead Specialist at Quilter. “Whenever we ran one of those sessions we had a good uptake of people attending. It helped us get the best out of Copilot.”
“In most rollouts, there’s a sense of hesitation or resistance,” says Alex Krupa. “With Copilot, we saw genuine excitement. It was new technology, and the team was enthusiastic about exploring its potential.”
“We’ve never seen a breakeven point reached so quickly with any other technology uptake. With Copilot, the breakeven point is a month. The speed of that is unique—and the fastest I’ve ever seen with a piece of technology.”
Freddie Collins, Investment Manager, Quilter Cheviot
“We aimed to enrich our team’s experience by freeing up just 1% of everyone’s time,” recalls David Reynolds. But, as Quilter staff began to drive forward their use of Microsoft 365 Copilot, it was clear that it would deliver much more time than this back to users.
“Copilot has completely changed our interaction with clients simply by reducing the amount of time it takes to write-up meeting notes,” advises Freddie Collins, Investment Manager at Quilter Cheviot. “We have the potential to do more client interactions in the same amount of time. If we have 174 investment managers doing on average 100 meetings, for each of those meetings, that’s 45 minutes saved. Immediately, that could save us 13,000 hours which we can reinvest into our clients”
He continues, “We’ve never seen a breakeven point reached so quickly with any other technology uptake. With Copilot, the breakeven point is a month. The speed of that is unique—and the fastest I’ve ever seen with a piece of technology.”
“Our biggest use case has been meetings and transcriptions,” acknowledges David Reynolds. “But I am keen to explore more novel use cases. Our second biggest use case is using Copilot as a starter for document creation. For example, Copilot is great at helping to write job descriptions and end-of-year appraisals.”
The potential to use Copilot to assess and audit unstructured data is also of great interest to the business.
Alex Krupa explains, “We’ve used Copilot to review unstructured data on shared drives and in SharePoint. Once upon a time, that would have taken our team members a couple of days of manually intensive document reviews. It’s the sort of thing Copilot can do in ten minutes.”
“Copilot is also helping to save training budget by helping out a lot with coding,” Alex Krupa adds. “To develop scripts or code in particular languages, once upon a time we’d have needed to send someone on a training course to learn the coding language, potentially costing thousands of pounds and for something which may not be used more than once or twice. Now they can use Copilot to help them write, edit, and check the script. As well as helping the team to be more productive, it’s a significant cost avoidance.”
“I’m probably one of the biggest fans of Copilot in the business,” admits Jeremy Mugridge, Marketing Director at Quilter. “I’ve already seen use cases that have got me quite excited!”
“Investment commentary writing is a specialist skill. Our specialist writers interview a portfolio manager and then it will take a few days to process the report. When we tested the process with Copilot, asking Copilot to turn the interview transcript into an investment commentary, it took about 15 minutes of prompting and half an hour of editing. Within an hour, we had a report to share with the economist. It’s a one-off test case that will be an absolute game changer for us.”
“We’ve been experimenting with Copilot in different ways,” Jeremy Mugridge continues. “We’ve used Copilot to transform a fairly mediocre award entry into something brilliant. And we used Copilot to generate video script ideas for a conference. I spent 10 minutes writing a prompt to ask Copilot to create the script for me—and the output became the basis for our video. I think it is empowering staff, supporting them, and easing their burden.”
He adds, “I think it can make us 20% more effective and the feedback I’m getting is that assumption is correct.”
The team at Quilter is now using Copilot to automate repetitive tasks, improve efficiency, and transform workflows across the organisation.
“A big part of the way we go about our audit activity involves the use of innovative technologies,” says Alex Krupa. “We’re trying to move away from sampling small numbers to providing assurance with full population testing. With the right controls and tooling, generative AI is helping us on that journey as part of a wider internal audit innovation and data analytics strategy.”
In addition to enabling this ambitious new approach to internal auditing, the audit team has been busy exploring other use cases for Microsoft 365 Copilot.
“Our audit work is quite heavily regulated,” adds Leo Cullen, Senior IT Audit Manager at Quilter. “We’ve been using Copilot to check our work and ensure that our output is up to standard, aligns with our internal methodology, and meets external standards.”
He continues, “Our work also often involves the aggregation of a lot of data; strategy papers, board reports, etc. We use Copilot to aggregate the information and present an initial review. This way, it helps to make our work more efficient.”
“What has surprised me the most is how much of a skill there is to prompting,” reports David Reynolds. “We’ve found a polarisation between those who will try three or four prompts, decide it is not for them and move on and the other people who will put some effort into working out how prompts work and think, ‘This is amazing and it solves everything!’ We probably underestimated that learning curve.”
Quilter is investing in helping its people develop the prompting skills they need to realise the potential of Copilot.
“I hope our deployment of Copilot will encourage people to want to work here,” says Jeremy Mugridge. “They will see us as a forward-thinking, technology-driven company and I would hope that will attract a higher calibre of person. We can help people get up to speed with prompting but also they can use Copilot to upskill themselves and fill in any gaps in their skillset.”
20% increase in team productivity
Providing employees with Microsoft 365 Copilot has been a cornerstone of Quilter’s strategy to foster productivity and confidence. By equipping teams with this powerful tool, the organisation has empowered employees to approach challenges with greater creativity.
“Copilot helps less technical people get up to speed quickly, avoiding mistakes that could have regulatory consequences,” says Jeremy Mugridge. “It simplifies complex processes and minimises risk, which is essential in our industry.”
Jeremy Mugridge continues: “Instead of asking, ‘Who can take on more workload?’ we now ask, ‘Are you using Copilot? How can it support you?’ Copilot is about empowering employees to think differently and be more effective.”
Quilter is expanding its use of Microsoft 365 Copilot, uncovering new opportunities to enhance efficiency and innovation and strengthen client relationships. The team is enthusiastic about the opportunities ahead.
“For some teams, adoption is progressing rapidly, and we’re planning to secure additional licences,” explains Cathryn Perkins, Business Analyst at Quilter. “In other areas, the plans are still developing, but Microsoft Copilot Studio for document management is a particularly exciting prospect.”
Stephen Curd agrees, “Copilot’s seamless integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a cornerstone of our approach, and we’re eager to see how it evolves as part of our broader technology roadmap.”
David Reynolds adds: “We’re eager to expand Copilot’s use, especially in areas like client relationships. The addition of voice capabilities opens up even more possibilities for streamlining our processes.”
Jeremy Mugridge confirms, “Microsoft is a partner that inspires us to push boundaries. Its tools and support help us drive innovation and shape the future of our organisation.”
“With Copilot, we saw genuine excitement. It was new technology, and the team was enthusiastic about exploring its potential.”
Alex Krupa, Head of Audit, Quilter
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