How data modernization can benefit advisors and clients

EY teams collaborated with the wealth management company on a solution that would provide a consistent user experience across multiple platforms and help enable advisors to leverage data in near real time. EY teams worked with the client’s technology team, led by the CIO and the head of architecture, to co-innovate solutions and build a data integration platform.

They began by addressing particular use cases. One of the most important was around customer account data, which didn’t update immediately because it was batch-based. The team built an event-driven architecture to help ensure account updates are reflected across applications in near real time, giving advisors confidence that any data they are viewing is now up to date. That means they can offer robust, up-to-the-minute advice and recommend product options that fit customers’ immediate needs.

Another key issue was the difficulty in getting different data platforms to communicate with each other. To address this problem, the team created an interoperability layer based on a canonical data model that aligns with a defined data taxonomy. This essentially means that any data flows, from whatever source and in whatever format, can be incorporated seamlessly without any disruption to operations, improving data quality and consistency. Again, this helps advisors provide timely and authoritative information and insights to customers — something that is essential for wealth management firms, helping to grow the business and retain advisors and their clients.

The EY team’s financial services knowledge was crucial in addressing these issues, as the teams carrying out the work had an in-depth understanding of the specific business needs the technology had to solve in the areas of data architecture and data flows, and the way these impact the experience of both advisors and customers.

Speed to market is essential in the highly competitive financial services sector; the first two phases of the project were completed in just nine months and the upgraded data architecture now enables the wealth manager to provide a seamless digital experience for advisors and customers alike, increasing their satisfaction with the organization. EY teams and the wealth management company are now working to define a larger scope of work that will expand on the components already built — and, crucially, form a scalable foundation that will make it easier and faster to innovate in the future, reducing complexity and risk.

As a result of innovations that EY teams developed with the client, its data architecture has become more agile and efficient, with a standardized data infrastructure in place. This has wider benefits for the wealth manager, which has an ambition to become a more product-oriented organization. The existing architecture did not support the accelerated development of new products, but the new data architecture will provide that much-needed agility.

“For any client, we want to help accelerate the time for implementation and transformation and reduce the cost,” says Moitra. “The solution we have built with this client tends to reduce the cost of overall transformation — and it is just the beginning; the components leveraged in this solution are part of a new business transformation platform we are developing, called EY Nexus for Wealth and Asset Management.”