The organisation
ACS Financial is a profit-for-purpose financial services company owned by Australian Christian Churches. For close to thirty years it has provided insurance and protection, commercial lending, and investment solutions to churches, ministries, Christian schools, small businesses and not-for-profits — with profits reinvested to support the ACC’s mission rather than distributed to shareholders.
More than 3,000 organisations rely on it, and it has access to over $400 million in dedicated lending for eligible churches, ministries and schools.
The challenge
Financial services carry obligations that most small and mid-sized organisations never encounter. Client financial records, insurance details and lending information are among the most sensitive categories of data an organisation can hold, and they sit inside a regulatory framework with real consequences for getting it wrong.
At the same time, this is a profit-for-purpose organisation. Every dollar spent on technology is a dollar not reinvested in its mission — so the environment has to be secure and reliable without being gold-plated. That balance is harder than either extreme.
Its stakeholders are also spread nationally across thousands of member organisations of widely varying technical sophistication, from large Christian schools to single-site churches.
A different kind of engagement
ACS Financial has its own IT manager. Nexnode does not replace that role — we support it.
This is co-managed IT: the internal team keeps ownership and day-to-day control, and Nexnode provides additional senior capacity across the areas where a second experienced pair of hands matters most. Since 2019 that has covered their network infrastructure, their server environment, and their Microsoft cloud services — identity, productivity, collaboration and cloud platform work.
In practice it means the IT manager is not the single point of failure. There is cover for leave, escalation for the problems that need a second opinion, and additional hands for project work that would otherwise stall or require a new hire.
The outcome
A seven-year working relationship in a sector where technology partners are scrutinised closely, and where the cost of a security failure would be measured in trust as much as dollars.
For organisations with an internal IT function that is capable but stretched, this model is often a better fit than full outsourcing — and considerably better value than a second full-time hire.