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 intimate knowledge of 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 was the last a 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 risked 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 re-writes 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 virtualize data across multiple legacy systems, the bank’s advisors gained total 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.
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 only populated at the end of the business day or a 24-hour cycle.
“One of the key requirements for the bank was 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 and virtualize data, and sometimes even transform it, across disparate legacy systems like 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 powers that differentiated it from the competition, including the ability to mine for the right information, gather data, and perform data transformation 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 if found to a consistent format. With CONNX feeding the virtual data warehouse, all this now happens in the background as a wealth manager visualizes trades and associated data seamlessly in a uniform dashboard.
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 and direct dashboarding for wealth managers means CONNX helped raise an already sterling reputation at the bank to the next level.
