IT support in London, built for serious businesses.
Managed IT for UK financial services, professional firms, and family offices that want a real engineer at the end of the phone — not a ticket queue. Fixed monthly retainer, named primary engineer, on-site across London when it matters.
Standards we align to
- Cyber Essentials certified
- FCA operational resilience aware
- DORA-ready
- ISO 27001 aligned
Where most providers let you down
Why IT support fails the businesses we work with
By the time a London hedge fund, law firm, or family office calls us, the pattern is usually the same. The current provider was fine when the team was eight people in one office. Now it is forty across two locations, the COO is fielding IT escalations from the trading desk at 8am, and nobody is quite sure what the monthly bill actually buys any more.
Three things repeatedly cause it. The first is the ticket queue: every issue, however small, joins a triage pile that gets actioned by whichever junior engineer is next free. There is no continuity, no memory of last week's outage, and no obvious owner. By the time the right person looks at it, the problem has been live for two hours and the principal has already emailed twice.
The second is the offshore call centre. The provider's marketing said 'UK-based support', but the phone is answered by a contracted team six time zones away reading from a script. They mean well. They cannot fix it. Your team learns not to call.
The third is the billing model. Hours-based agreements turn every conversation into a meter running. Per-ticket pricing punishes you for asking for help. Neither aligns the provider's incentives with yours — the provider only earns more when something goes wrong, which is exactly the opposite of what you want.
And underneath all three: there is rarely anyone at the provider thinking about the next 18 months. No technology roadmap, no fractional CTO function, no senior voice in the room when you are choosing a new fund-administration platform or opening a New York office. The IT becomes purely reactive — and reactive IT is what gets you a 'crawled, not indexed' on resilience.
£950/mo
From, per 5-user retainer
12 min
Average first response
4.9/5
Across 47 client reviews
London
Engineers, on-site as needed
What is in the retainer
What we actually do
One fixed monthly fee. No callout charges, no per-ticket surcharges, no 'out of scope' surprises. The list below is included for every client from day one.
Unlimited UK helpdesk
Phone, email, chat — answered by a named engineer in London, not a script in Manila.
24/7 monitoring and alerting
Lightweight agents on every endpoint, server, and network device. We see the failure before your team does.
Patch and firmware management
OS, third-party apps, firewalls, switches. Tested in a ring, rolled out in the maintenance window we agree with you.
Endpoint protection
Next-gen AV, EDR, device encryption, and mobile device management — all under one console we operate for you.
Microsoft 365 administration
Identity, licensing, Conditional Access, Intune, SharePoint, Exchange, Teams, Copilot — including the licence-rightsizing nobody else seems to do.
Backup and recovery oversight
Daily backups for M365, endpoints, and servers — with quarterly restore drills so the recovery actually works.
Named primary engineer
One senior engineer who knows your environment by name, with a documented backup so cover never gaps.
On-site visits across London
Office moves, new-starter walk-throughs, principal home visits, AV builds — covered in the retainer up to a generous monthly cap.
Quarterly business reviews
A senior face-to-face: what broke, what was prevented, what is changing, what to plan for the next 90 days.
Full scope on the managed IT support service page · larger projects (M365 tenant migration, network refresh, penetration test) quoted separately.
Compliance posture
The boring details that keep regulators happy
Generic London MSPs can answer the helpdesk. The difference is what happens when the FCA visits or your investor sends a 90-question due-diligence pack.
Cyber Essentials certified
We hold the certification ourselves and sponsor clients through Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus as part of the retainer. For most regulated firms this is the floor your insurers, your investors, and the larger counterparties already require — and the technical controls behind it are the same ones that quietly stop most opportunistic intrusions.
FCA operational resilience aware
For our hedge fund and PE clients, this means we map your important business services, document the technology that supports them, set impact tolerances, and run the scenario tests the FCA expects. When your compliance officer is asked for the operational-resilience pack, it exists, and it is current.
DORA-ready
DORA reshaped what regulators expect on ICT risk, incident reporting, and third-party oversight. For UK firms with EU touchpoints — crypto, fintech, cross-border PE — we run the full programme: ICT register, third-party register, incident-classification workflow, and the testing schedule. The output is documentation you can hand straight to a regulator without a 24-hour scramble.
ISO 27001 aligned
We operate to ISO 27001 controls internally and we can run an aligned programme inside your environment if you need certification — common for firms responding to enterprise customer due diligence or institutional LP requests. We have walked clients through first-time certification in under nine months without it becoming a second full-time job for anyone on your team.
Industries we know
Specialist enough to be useful from day one
We do not pretend to know every sector. The six below are where we have done the most work, and where our playbooks are sharpest.
Hedge funds
Trading desk uptime, market-data plumbing, and FCA / DORA evidence ready for the next regulator visit.
Learn morePrivate equity
Secure deal rooms, portfolio-company IT oversight, and quiet support across multi-jurisdiction teams.
Learn moreWealth management
Client-data protection, platform integrations, and an audit trail that does not need a 24-hour scramble.
Learn moreFamily offices
Discreet IT and cybersecurity across the office, the principals, and the household — one team, one number.
Learn moreLegal firms
Document management, ethical walls, SRA-aligned controls, and reliable kit for partners who travel.
Learn moreAI startups
GPU cloud, model security, ISO 42001-ready governance, and scale-as-you-go for technical founders.
Learn moreClient outcome · London hedge fund
Nerdster transformed our IT from a constant headache into a competitive advantage. Their understanding of FCA compliance requirements saved us months of work.
Chief Operating Officer
London hedge fund · multi-strategy
99.97%
Achieved uptime across market hours, prior 12 months
8 min
Median first response on priority-one tickets
0
Material regulatory findings since onboarding
Pricing
Fixed monthly retainer, sized to your team
One per-user price covers helpdesk, monitoring, security, M365 administration, and on-site visits. The bands below are guides — we will quote exactly once we have looked at your environment.
Essential
Growing teams
5-user retainer · £52 per additional user · business hours support
- Unlimited UK helpdesk
- 24/7 monitoring & alerting
- Microsoft 365 administration
- Endpoint protection & patching
- Monthly reporting
Business
Established firms
Cyber Essentials Plus support · extended hours · vCIO guidance
- Everything in Essential
- Cyber Essentials Plus sponsorship
- Advanced email security
- Security awareness training
- Quarterly business reviews
- vCIO strategic guidance
Financial Services
FCA-regulated firms
24/7/365 priority support · DORA framework · MDR included
- Everything in Business
- DORA compliance framework
- FCA operational resilience
- Managed Detection & Response
- Annual penetration testing
- Dedicated account manager
All prices exclude VAT. Minimum 5 users. Rolling 30-day terms after a 90-day onboarding window.
FAQ
Common questions about IT support in London
How fast do you respond to a ticket?
Our average first response is 12 minutes during business hours, and most common issues are resolved on the first contact. Critical incidents — anything that stops your team working — are escalated to a named engineer immediately, including out of hours for clients on our 24/7 retainers.
What hours do you cover?
Standard cover is 8am to 6pm, Monday to Friday, with on-call for priority-one incidents. Financial services and trading-desk clients move to a 24/7 retainer so the same team supports the pre-open run-up at 6am and the late-evening close on US markets.
Do you outsource the helpdesk offshore?
No. Every engineer who picks up the phone is in the UK, on our team, and able to escalate to whoever last touched your environment. We deliberately stay small enough that you will recognise the voice on the other end after the first few weeks.
What if we run specialist software — Bloomberg, Eze, a niche legal platform?
Most of our clients run something specialist. Our engineers have hands-on experience with Bloomberg Terminal, Eze EMS/OMS, Charles River, Advent Geneva, NetDocuments, iManage, and a long list of fund-administration and legal-practice platforms. Where we have not seen a system before, we liaise with the vendor directly so you do not become the messenger.
Do you charge per ticket or per hour?
Neither. We run on a fixed monthly retainer based on user count, with unlimited helpdesk and on-site visits across London included. Project work — a Microsoft 365 migration, a new office build-out, a penetration test — is scoped and quoted separately so there are no surprise invoices.
How do you handle remote and hybrid workers?
The same way we handle the office. Endpoint monitoring follows the device, not the postcode, so a laptop in a Hampshire kitchen gets the same patching, the same protection, and the same support number as the kit in your Mayfair office. We courier replacement hardware the same day for clients on our Business and Financial Services tiers.
Are you Cyber Essentials certified?
Yes. We are Cyber Essentials certified ourselves and we sponsor clients through Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus as part of the retainer. We have a near-100% first-time pass rate because we do the technical work properly rather than ticking boxes.
Can you act as a fractional CTO as well as run the IT?
Yes — and most clients in the £5m-£100m revenue band end up doing both. The fractional CTO sits in your leadership meetings, owns the technology roadmap, and translates between board and engineering. The managed-IT team keeps the lights on underneath. One contract, one point of accountability.
Book a 30-minute IT review
One call. We look at what you have, what is costing you time, and whether we are a sensible fit. No sales script, no pressure — and if your current setup is already in good shape, we will tell you.