Financial Services
500-device secure decommission for London financial firm
A regulated financial services firm needed to decommission 500 devices across two London offices within a strict compliance window.
Assets collected
1,248
Data sanitised
982
Buyback value
£18k
CO₂e saved
42t
Established
2008
Certification
ADISA 8.0
Coverage
UK · EU · WW
Response
24–72h
Challenge
A regulated financial services firm needed to decommission 500 devices across two London offices within a strict compliance window.
Solution
Director-led project planning, secure collection, certified data destruction, asset-level reporting, and value recovery for reusable equipment.
Outcome
100% of data-bearing assets received certificate evidence. Project completed in 5 business days with full audit trail for regulators.
The situation
The firm was consolidating two central London offices into a single site and retiring the hardware left behind — a mix of trading floor workstations, standard business laptops, meeting room equipment, and a small server room supporting local services. As a regulated business, the constraint was never really the logistics. It was evidence. The compliance team needed to demonstrate, device by device, that every piece of storage media leaving the buildings had been accounted for and irreversibly dealt with, and they needed that demonstration to survive scrutiny long after the project team had dispersed.
Why the window was tight
Lease exit dates fixed the outside deadline and the trading floor could not lose working equipment before the replacement site was live. That left a five business day window in which collection had to happen without disrupting operations, and building access was restricted to specific hours with a shared goods lift serving other tenants. Scoping established these constraints first, because they determined the sequence far more than the asset count did.
How we approached it
We surveyed both sites and produced a phased plan that took the non-critical floors first, leaving trading positions until their replacements were confirmed operational. Serial numbers and asset tags were captured at the point of collection rather than on arrival, which meant the client's own asset register could be reconciled against our inventory before the vehicles had left the building. Loads were sealed with recorded seal numbers and moved in GPS-tracked vehicles.
Handling the data
Every data-bearing device was routed according to its condition and classification. Devices that passed verification were erased to certified standards and became candidates for resale; anything that had failed, could not be verified, or held higher-classification data was physically destroyed. Certificates referenced individual serial numbers rather than batch totals, which is the difference between a document that answers an auditor's question and one that raises another.
Reconciliation and evidence
The closing reconciliation matched the collection inventory against the destruction record with no unexplained variance. The client received a full asset register with disposition per device, certificate packs cross-referenced to serials, environmental and reuse figures for their sustainability reporting, and a settlement statement for the equipment that carried residual value. That pack remains retrievable through the client portal, which matters because the audit questions that eventually arrive rarely arrive during the project.
What made the difference
Two things. Capturing serials at source rather than at the facility removed the gap where discrepancies normally appear and become impossible to resolve. And sequencing the collection around operational dependencies rather than around our own efficiency meant the trading floor never lost capability it still needed — which was the risk the client actually cared about, more than the disposal itself.
Other Case Studies
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GDPR-compliant clinical workstation disposal across eight NHS-affiliated sites with 68% reuse and zero data incidents.
- Data centre rack decommission and recovery
Secure decommission of 120 server racks with certified sanitisation, minimal downtime, and £42k residual value recovery.
Need secure IT disposal across the UK?
Speak with Reuse Technology Group about secure collection, certified data destruction, asset recovery, and sustainability reporting for your organisation.
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GDPR-aware processes · Auditable reporting · Responsible recycling