Pershing Gains Financial Insight

BI Applications Scale to Over 75,000 Users

When it comes to business intelligence (BI) technology, Pershing LLC has learned an important lesson: Always orient your information systems to the way people work, rather than forcing workers to orient themselves to your information systems. This reasoning reflects a growing trend in the BI industry – a desire to break down the barriers between BI technology and casual users, or consumers, of information. Sure, professional analysts still need general-purpose BI tools so they can create custom reports. Information consumers, on the other hand, generally want to submit simple queries and receive answers in the context of their day-to-day activities.

"Most people don't need multi-page reports or powerful ad hoc analysis capabilities," says Patrick Yip, a director in the Technology Group at Pershing LLC. "In fact, casual users shouldn't have to interact with BI tools at all. Instead, they prefer targeted information that has been embedded in their familiar business applications. It's generally more effective if the BI technology operates under the covers."

With this premise as its guiding principle, Pershing's business intelligence environment, built using Information Builders WebFOCUS software, does much more than merely generate month-end reports for managers and executives. It also delivers aggregate views of account balances, financial holdings, and trades to tens of thousands of business users, right within their familiar broker workstation application.

"One of the main reasons our BI environment has been adopted so widely is because it does not require any special experience or sophistication," continues Yip. "If you can order a book or make travel arrangements online, you'll find our BI capabilities very easy by comparison. We rarely get calls about how to access information or run reports because people already know how to use this type of system."

Driven by Innovation

Pershing is well known for its innovative use of technology, which extends to every facet of its operation. As a leading provider of clearing and financial services outsourcing solutions, the company serves more than 1,100 financial organizations and independent investment advisors, who collectively represent nearly six million individual investors. Pershing has more than $800 billion under administration.

Yip works in the eAnalytics group, where his staff focuses on creating data warehouse and business intelligence solutions. In recent years, much of their effort has been devoted to adding analytical capabilities to Pershing's NetExchange Pro online brokerage platform, which is used by more than 85,000 investment professionals around the world.

Previously these investment professionals could only access customer information via hard copy reports or standard files containing all their data, which they had to manage and use on their own. NetExchange Pro had some rudimentary reporting capabilities, but they were geared toward accessing information one account at a time or one investment professional at a time. As a result, many of these external users were requesting custom reports from Pershing's IT department, which was putting a drain on programming resources.

"Getting a hold of this same type of information used to be rather tedious," Yip admits. "Either users had to create their own databases and manage daily downloads of data, or they had to weed through hard copy reports and manually input information into spreadsheets to analyze the data. Our customers were telling us that this was not an optimal way to analyze their business."

A New Mindset for BI

Yip knew it was time for an upgrade. To attain his vision of business intelligence without barriers, he needed a highly scalable BI environment that could provide targeted information on demand. As he laid out his vision for an ad hoc reporting environment that could be accessed from within the NetExchange Pro platform, he singled out WebFOCUS as the right technology for the job. This comprehensive BI platform had the parameterized ad hoc reporting capabilities he was looking for, and it could be seamlessly integrated with Pershing's existing software infrastructure.

"We had three main criteria in a BI platform: scalability, security, and ease of integration," Yip sums up. "Whenever we pick software, the number-one thing we look for is scalability due to our large, widely dispersed user base. Security is important because our investment professionals trust us with sensitive financial information. And integration influences everything, since we wanted to embed BI capabilities within our existing broker workstation environment. WebFOCUS satisfied all of these requirements."

Yip says the learning curve for WebFOCUS is higher than for some other BI tools, but the payoff is a more comprehensive environment for data integration, reporting and BI. "Once you get up to speed with the WebFOCUS software, you find yourself with a very robust and scalable business intelligence environment," he reports. "In addition to graphical reporting capabilities, it has its own programming language, which gives you a lot of flexibility."

Pershing installed WebFOCUS on a Unix platform along with Oracle Database 10g, where about 1TB of customer data is stored. Developers created a dual-purpose architecture that allows brokers to either use a browser-based or a Windows-based version of the NetExchange Pro software to access BI capabilities. A few clicks of the mouse generally yields the information they are looking for.

"Since we standardized on WebFOCUS for enterprise reporting, our BI environment has become much better integrated," says Yip. "It offers much greater flexibility, and there have been no scalability issues. We have made the look-and-feel very consistent with the rest of our broker workstation platform. This saves time and improves efficiency for our customers, especially at the end of each month when they are reviewing the numbers."

In addition to analyzing historical data in a warehouse, Pershing's BI environment can access data from the firm's operational systems to perform real-time analytics. The same BI applications access aggregate data to help managers keep tabs on how many of those transactions are being requested, how many have been processed, and how many are pending. It also helps them submit "what if" queries associated with customer accounts, such as "show me a list of all customers who have bonds maturing in the next 30 days."

Pershing also uses WebFOCUS to manage service levels for investment managers through custom scorecards, a highly visual way to monitor broker performance. Within this real-time BI system, operations managers can identify where work is building up in different queues and react accordingly. They can also use this information to develop scorecards for customers – a handy way to discuss service levels during account-review sessions. "BI technology is quickly becoming an essential part of the way our company does business," Yip says.

From Provider to Consultative Partner

Some of Pershing's customers are so enthusiastic about the new BI capabilities that they are partnering with Pershing to develop their own personal BI and data warehouse solutions. To meet the needs of these customers, Pershing formed a new company called iNautix USA. "Our BI software has become more useful and more popular," confirms Yip. "We now have the data models and reports on which to build, and we're leveraging what we have been doing all along to create these personalized BI environments."

When asked if he has any words of wisdom for his colleagues, Yip is quick to offer a few suggestions. "The simpler you make your reports, the higher the adoption rate," he says. "Most business users don't want to create their own reports. They want quick answers to common questions."

Even people who do need complete reports want to be able to easily extract information that interests them, Yip adds. To meet the needs of these more advanced users, he suggests parameterized reports that let people qualify results based on variables such as geography, product, or timeframe. For example, Pershing's Account Profile report has all the parameters investment advisors need to locate and qualify information about their end customers. There is no need to fire up a report writer or submit a complex query. The technology is just another tab on the broker workstation.

The Ultimate Payoff

As Pershing breaks down the barriers between investment professionals and the critical financial information they depend on, the company is proving that BI can pay off on many fronts: technical, operational, and in the form of measurable financial returns. But the biggest payoff, says Yip, comes from the goodwill of its brokers, as attested to by the stellar adoption rate of its BI system. In a relatively short timeframe, more than 80 percent of its potential user base has adopted the new BI capabilities – about 75,000 users total.

"We measure success in terms of customer satisfaction," Yip concludes. "We have witnessed a very high adoption rate with our BI applications for one simple reason: the software makes a difference in what our customers do every day."