About three years ago Asgard started a program of work around IT security which involved getting the "many layers" of security to comply with the ISO17799 standard.

This included "a lot of investment" in protecting the company's borders with clustered CheckPoint firewalls, Messagelabs for hosted e-mail filtering, and a McAfee appliance for an additional layer of scanning.

Asgard's core application, AdvisorNet, gives its financial planner partners a Web-based reporting and customer management.

Li said Asgard was one of the first wealth management companies to offer a Web-based application, which is now in its third-generation.

AdvisorNet was originally developed on Tru64 Unix and VMS, but was migrated to Sun's Solaris about three years ago.