Case Study: IMAS

Overview

IMAS is a financial services firm who specialise in selling companies in the financial services sector. There is a high level of transparency with publicly traded companies. This is in stark contrast with unquoted companies. Since 1995 IMAS have been building MaxImas to provide a total view of all UK financial services companies. By being better informed IMAS are able to offer better advice.

IMAS objective is to be the leading corporate finance adviser acting for vendors in the sale of unquoted financial services businesses.

In the pursuit of this objective, IMAS have developed MaxImas - A Filemaker developed tool that is a bottom up analysis of the UK financial services industry. IMAS staff have personally analysed over 25,000 companies by activity and ownership, the results of which are now stored in MaxImas - developed on Filemaker.

In early 2007, after a competitive pitching process, IMAS commissioned Cordis to do a ground up development of MaxImas to move away from their aging Microsoft access solution. After completing the Phase 1 databases and nearing the end of the Phase 1 website, IMAS are considering their aspirations for future development due to commence imminently.

Client testimonial

"The previous team using MS SQL and Dot Net failed to achieve in 2 years what Cordis did with Filemaker in 6 months."
Olly Laughton-Scott, Managing Director - IMAS
 

Areas of Innovation

  • Use of Filemaker Web Viewer as a means of integrating with 'Companies House' (www.companieshouse.co.uk) by using a PHP function to call XML which is subsequently extracted into Filemaker fields
  • Use of Filemaker Web Viewer as a means of viewing data from websites such as the Financial Services Authority (www.fsa.gov.uk)
  • Integration of Filemaker data with 3rd party charting software
  • Automated scripted data migration from previous Microsoft Access solution via live ODBC connection

Key Features

  • Public facing website showing results of analysis by financial service sector and activity
  • Integration with Companies House for interrogating data
  • Generates 'Exceptions Reports', which are highly customised reports, based on a search criteria that is specific to the client's unique user process. An example of such a report is the 'Same Postcode Report', which is a list of all companies assigned to the same postcode, but assigned to different parent companies.
Client Version:Filemaker 9
Server Version:Filemaker Server 9 Advanced
Web Language:PHP
Servers:1 x Filemaker Server
 1 x Web Server (with Filemaker Server Publishing Engine)
Users:10 + Public Website