Our Story

Lanware was founded in 1993 by the late Conor Cassidy, who recognised an opportunity to build a London-based IT provider just as the internet was beginning to revolutionise business. In the early years, Conor and a small team delivered traditional IT support to small businesses across a range of sectors, establishing a reputation for trust and reliability.

Everything changed in 2005, shortly after Henry Duncombe (now our Managing Director) joined the firm.

At the time, many businesses were still running servers from office cupboards, with backup tapes heading home in handbags, if they weren’t forgotten! But our financial services clients demanded something far more secure.

On a bold pitch, we proposed moving their servers into a fully managed hosted environment, what would later be known as the private cloud, providing secure access from anywhere in the world.

To our surprise, clients embraced the idea immediately, and many of those early adopters remain with us today.

That pivotal moment reshaped our future. We committed ourselves fully to financial services, and married that market, and nearly 20 years later, 100% of our clients are FCA-regulated firms.

In 2018, we built on that foundation and launched Finance Forward 365, an end-to-end managed IT service designed exclusively for financial firms.

Delivered entirely from the Microsoft public cloud, it provides modern workplace technology, secure infrastructure, cyber security, business intelligence, and expert user support, one of the very few pure public cloud solutions in the market tailored to the sector.

Today, our speciality is independent financial firms, particularly fund managers, who want to focus on their core business while outsourcing IT operations to a trusted partner.

By working with Lanware, clients gain more than technology, they become part of a close-knit community of firms with shared needs, culture, and ambitions, and benefit from deep industry expertise they won’t find with a generalist provider.

Though Conor sadly passed away a decade ago, his vision continues to guide us. From a small IT provider to a specialist partner for the financial services community, Lanware’s journey has always been defined by innovation, resilience, and lasting client trust.