Challenges
A traditional data warehouse provided out-of-date information during planned and unplanned customer calls—resulting in loss of expert authority and trust.
Customer Story
Powering wealth management with real-time data insights
Meet the Customer:
This bank is one of the largest in Canada, and its wealth management division manages over $1.1 trillion CAD in assets for high-net-worth individuals and families, institutions, and charitable organizations.
Outcomes
- Built a virtual data warehouse
- Created real-time, virtualized dashboards
- Improved wealth management customer loyalty
- Provided superior customer service
- Added high-net-wealth customers
- Cut legacy data management costs
Solutions
Too many data sources—no single view
This Canadian bank’s wealth management division administers over $1.1 trillion CAD in assets for high-net-worth individuals and families, institutions, and charitable organizations. It’s a corner of the financial world that lives or dies by the authority of information, exclusive and up-to-date analysis of trends and market movements, and, above all, customer trust in the expertise of advisors.
When a customer calls the bank about her portfolio, she expects her advisor to have her financial status at his fingertips, along with the right information to know when and how to act. This expertise is literally what she’s paying for.
But as the wealth management market has sped up, data has proliferated. On top of that, people have gotten used to instant, reliable access to information thanks to experiences interacting with Google, Apple, and Amazon. For the bank, this meant that something as simple as a caller waiting a little too long for an advisor to pull up a portfolio or confusion over which version of a report the caller had received could cost a customer’s business. And that of her friends, family, and colleagues.
The reality was that changing data volumes and customer expectations meant the bank’s customer service was at risk of falling behind. What it needed was a solution to empower its advisors with instant access to more customer data than ever before, pulled from numerous data sources—and presented in a virtualized, accessible view.
Doing nothing was not an option. But the solutions offered by Oracle, TIBCO, and iWay all had critical downsides, from requiring too many components to a constant need for rewrites and re-linking data to vendor lock-in. The bank needed another way.
Software AG’s CONNX was it. With seamless, powerful, and quick access to virtualized data across multiple legacy systems, the bank’s advisors gained complete insight into everything a caller wanted to know—in real time, in simple dashboard views.
And since the bank was already using Adabas, adding CONNX meant getting a complete solution from a single vendor.
Data access and virtualization: Going real-time, with a virtual data warehouse
The bank added CONNX to begin modernizing its rudimentary data warehouse. CONNX brought the bank its first taste of real-time access to a traditional data warehouse model. A model that, while ideal for batching analytics, business intelligence, and reporting, is generally populated only at the end of the business day or after a 24-hour cycle.
“One of the key requirements for the bank was that it wanted information accessible in real-time,” says Daniel Bierman, Principal Product Manager, Software AG. “It also needed to be able to generate historical reports—going back decades—so that a wealth manager knew which version of a monthly or quarterly report was the most recent his caller had received, and what updates, including intra-day activity during the call, had occurred since.”
That’s why, after seeing what CONNX could do for a basic data warehouse, the bank decided to harness the solution to connect to more data sources and build something even more powerful: a virtual data warehouse. The new system, which the bank called its Active Data Warehouse, would be able to access, virtualize, and sometimes even transform data across disparate legacy systems such as Adabas, Sybase, AS400, Oracle, and beyond—all in real time.
CONNX was the only solution that could deliver on the bank’s needs. Its new virtual data warehouse had unique capabilities that set it apart from the competition, including the ability to mine for the right information, gather data, and perform data transformations to fix errors on the fly.
For instance, if the date of a particular customer’s stock trade existed in different formats across different data sources, CONNX could mine for the date in question—no matter how the date was formatted, such as a string with the year first or last—and convert what it found to a consistent format. With CONNX feeding the virtual data warehouse, all of this now happens in the background while a wealth manager visualizes trades and associated data seamlessly on a uniform dashboard.
Data-driven decisions boost customer satisfaction and growth
For the bank and its customers, the virtual data warehouse represented a total turnaround. Now that managers had a complete overview of a customer’s portfolio at their fingertips in real time, customer trust soared.
High-net-worth individuals knew that their investments were in the right hands, no matter how the global markets moved. As word got out, the bank saw an increase in customer satisfaction, and the rising tide lifted the bank and the wealth it managed for individuals, institutions, and non-profit charities alike. Fresh data, smiling customers, and powerfully effective, direct dashboarding for wealth managers mean CONNX helped elevate an already sterling reputation at the bank to the next level.
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