tobook · Hospitality and booking
Case study
Separating a listed company's website from the business that was sold
When Liontrust bought River Global's asset management arm, the listed PLC needed its own website and hosting. We separated them while the site stayed online.
- Client
- Industry
- Financial services
- Relationship
- Almost four years, continuing
riverglobalplc.com · last 90 days
0.00%
of requests returned an error
Results
The results
Since 2022
looking after River Global's web estate
The same named engineer throughout, including through the acquisition.
2026
carve-out delivered after the Liontrust acquisition
Planned by an engineer who already knew the estate.
Nothing shared
between the PLC and the business that was sold
Separate hosting, access and support from completion day.
The challenge
We have looked after River Global’s web estate since 2022. In 2026 Liontrust acquired the group’s asset management business. The PLC and the business being sold had been sharing a website and the infrastructure underneath it.
The listed company needed a site of its own, on hosting it controlled, with access that the acquired business no longer had. The site also had to stay online throughout, because a listed company’s website is where the market reads its announcements.
What we did
We built the PLC a standalone estate with its own hosting, access controls and support arrangement, shared with nothing belonging to the business that was leaving. Then we cut it over.
We audited what the two companies shared, decided what belonged to whom and sequenced the changes so that nothing depended on something that had already moved.
A listed company’s site carries obligations an ordinary marketing site doesn’t. Regulatory announcements have to be published on time and stay published. Board and governance information has to be accurate and easy to find. So we moved the pages the market relies on first and checked them before anything else followed.
What we’d do differently
The site itself moved cleanly. The one delay was a short wait while domain and security certificate changes were made on domains we didn’t manage.
On every migration since, we take on the domain and certificate cutover ourselves and rehearse it before the day.
How we work with River Global
We’ve worked with River Global for almost four years. They have a named engineer, request changes in a shared channel and get a short written summary of each month’s work. There’s no minimum term.
How it went
How we separated the two companies
The carve-out took weeks. Most of the work was untangling what the two companies shared.
We already knew the estate
We had supported River Global's web presence since 2022, so we already knew the estate when the acquisition happened and could plan the carve-out properly.
The acquisition set the deadline
Once the asset management business was acquired, the two companies could no longer share hosting, credentials or a support arrangement.
We audited what was shared
We listed every domain, login and deployment path, and every place one company's content sat inside the other's infrastructure. The list was longer than expected.
We built the PLC an estate of its own
Its own hosting, access controls and support arrangement, set up alongside the existing one before anything was cut over.
The regulatory pages moved first
A listed company's site is where the market reads its announcements. We moved those pages first and checked them before anything else followed.
Completion day
The site stayed online throughout. From completion, the PLC's hosting, logins and support were fully separate from the business that was sold.
Technology
What the PLC controls now
The PLC now runs on its own hosting, decides who has access and has monitoring that alerts an engineer if the site goes down.
Delivery
Each property builds and deploys on its own
Every site in the estate is hosted independently and rebuilt automatically when its content or code changes. Changes can be previewed before they go live, and any previous build can be restored.
- Independent hosting per property
- Preview before publish
- Rollback to any earlier build
Separation
Separate hosting accounts
The PLC's hosting, credentials and access controls are its own at the account level. Access is granted to named people for named reasons, and the acquired business has none.
- Account-level separation
- Named access only
- No shared access
Assurance
Independent monitoring and alerts
The estate is monitored separately from the hosting that runs it, and alerts go to an engineer. For a listed company, the site being down is a disclosure problem as well as a technical one.
- Independent monitoring
- Alerts go to an engineer
- Change history retained
Scale
The estate over the last quarter
These figures cover the River Global web estate over the most recent quarter.
- requests served across the estate
- 870K
- of requests to the PLC site returned an error
- 0.00%
- properties, each independently hosted
- 3
Measured across the River Global web estate over the 90 days to 23 September 2026.
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