In 2025 the SRA fined 35 firms more than £565,000 for anti-money-laundering failings, and the message behind the numbers was blunt: holding a client’s ID on file is no longer enough. A firm has to prove, in practice, that it knows where the money came from. For the law firms packed into Spinningfields, that lands as a software problem before it lands as a compliance one, because the evidence a partner would need to produce on demand is scattered across systems that were never wired to each other. The risk assessment is in one tool, the ID check in another, the source-of-funds trail in a third, and the only thing joining them is whoever last remembered to copy data across.
That is the broader condition here. The 22-acre estate Allied London built between Deansgate and the Irwell (the “Canary Wharf of the North,” holding more than 35% of Manchester’s prime office space) packs three regulated professions into a handful of towers, each running its own specialist platform, none of them joined up. AML compliance is where the disconnection causes the most immediate damage.
A Single Address, Three Regulated Stacks
The unusual thing about Spinningfields is the mix, not just the density.
- Law firms run case and practice management on Clio, LEAP, Actionstep or Access Legal, with documents and email on iManage or NetDocuments.
- Accountants and corporate-finance houses sit on Xero or Sage, with audit, tax and engagement tooling on top.
- Wealth managers and IFAs run the back office on Intelliflo Intelligent Office (used by around 30% of UK advisers) or Iress Xplan.
- Microsoft 365 and SharePoint sit underneath nearly everyone, holding the files the specialist platforms never see.
The tenant list makes it concrete: DWF, Fieldfisher (17th floor of No 1 Spinningfields), Weightmans and JMW Solicitors anchor the legal side; Deloitte, PwC and Grant Thornton the accountancy side, from the same handful of towers. Every one of these firms has invested heavily in its core platform and has no appetite to replace it. The value is in the seams between them.
Where the Evidence Trail Comes Apart
Beyond AML, the same disconnection runs through the whole file:
- Onboarding and AML live apart from the matter or client record: ID, risk scoring and source-of-funds evidence captured in one place, re-keyed into another, with periodic reviews falling through the cracks because nothing prompts them.
- The case or advice platform does not feed billing and accounting, so fee earners and finance staff retype time, disbursements and invoices.
- Document management is its own world, separate from the matter and billing record, which breeds duplicate filing and version confusion.
- No one has a firm-wide view: a partner or COFA cannot see matters, WIP, billing and compliance status across systems without someone assembling a report by hand each month.
When the AML trail in particular is stitched together manually, the evidence is only ever as reliable as the last person who remembered to copy it across. That is the gap the regulator is now fining firms for, and the kind of gap software is built to close.
What We Build Around Your Case, Accounting or Advice Platform
For Spinningfields firms the engagements are consistent, and they land on recurring, retainer-shaped work:
- Integrations connecting Clio, LEAP, Actionstep, Access Legal, Intelliflo or Iress Xplan to billing, accounting (Xero or Sage), iManage, NetDocuments, SharePoint and your AML tooling, so data is captured once instead of typed three times. This API integration work is the usual starting point.
- Compliance and reporting dashboards that pull matters, WIP, billing and AML status into a single firm-wide view, so a COFA or finance partner stops waiting on a hand-assembled report.
- Document automation that turns the repeatable parts of onboarding and reporting into a structured, evidenced process. For AML, that structure doubles as proof the checks were done.
- Secure, on-brand client portals: bespoke web applications giving high-value clients an audited experience the stock platform cannot.
Across these projects we have integrated with accounting platforms, CRMs, document systems and dozens of third-party APIs; the first piece is usually small, and the relationship tends to outlive it.
Working near Spinningfields?
If your AML evidence, matter record, billing and reporting live in separate systems, your weakest link is whoever last copied data between them. The 2025 fines make clear that is an exposure the regulator acts on. Show us where a check or a figure gets re-entered by hand, and we will map the custom software that turns that gap into an evidenced, automatic step first. Spinningfields is one district within our wider Manchester work.
