Industry:
Financial Services
Size:
2,200 employees
Tenure:
8 years as a Datawatch customer Challenge: Create an online service offering for the global financial industry, capable of meeting the most demanding requirements for efficient, secure and scalable operational support. The offering would create an interactive web environment for Broadridge’s customers to access and analyze the data contained in thousands of reports and documents on demand.
Monarch Report Analytics Platform:
Monarch, Monarch Enterprise Server

Interesting fact:
Broadridge’s original requirement was for Monarch to process 100,000,000 ( 100 million ) pages monthly. Today, Broadridge estimates Monarch processes more than 200 million pages per month.

 

Building a Bridge between Volumes of Data and Salient Information

Companies in the financial industry — both large and small — are drowning in data. The smart companies have realized that the time, effort, resources and specific expertise needed to manage large volumes of data detracts from their core value proposition. Those companies have turned to Broadridge to outsource the storage, management and presentation of their electronic documents.

Today, Broadridge is the top-ranked brokerage process services outsourcing provider. The company’s legacy is stellar: it began as the Brokerage Services Business of ADP, was spun out of ADP and now offers a complete portfolio of mission-critical products and services for securities processing, clearing and investor communication.

In the late 1990s, Broadridge embarked on a strategic plan to complement the company’s transaction processing and proxy services transaction and brokerage reporting services. What seemed a simple proposition — offer outsourced document services — actually held a lot of complexity and risk for the company. The market was quickly clamoring for online COLD (Computer Output to Laser Disk), but not many firms were offering those services. Why? The “basic” approach was to use a third party product, with third party hosting. This approach would meet Broadridge’s requirements for its online offering, but also would result in too many vendors involved in too many complex technologies. And, the report modeling (delivering only the pertinent data from standard reports ) — a key component to Broadridge’s reporting services — required a custom implementation for each customer. This aspect of the approach would negatively impact the scalability of Broadridge’s offering.

What if Broadridge could find the right report mining technology, one that could handle one million pages per month, and one that could be “white labeled” for Broadridge’s solution? The answer was Monarch Pro with Monarch Enterprise Server. In 2001, Broadridge released PostEdge, a cost-efficient, web-based platform for electronic document storage, self-service delivery and customized presentation.

And today — despite waves of technology fads and unforeseen technology breakthroughs — the Monarch Report Analytics Platform serves as one of the key components for Broadridge’s PostEdge.

Why Broadridge?

It probably seems easy enough to manage one’s data in-house. Until one thinks about all the data, documents and files generated by even a small brokerage firm: transaction confirmations, account statements, daily reports, broker sales commission reports, new account documents, pre-and post-sale prospectuses, annual reports, interim reports, 1099s and other tax related documents and more. Factor in the hardware and software costs to manage all this data. And don’t forget the dedicated IT resources to manage this.

Clearly, outsourcing document posting and archiving — and the necessary report mining activities needed to turn the data into information — make economic and practical sense.

Perhaps most importantly, after 10 years of working with clients’ documents and reporting needs, Broadridge is an expert on mining financial services firms’ reports for specific, required information.

“PostEdge is all about efficiency. Efficiency for Broadridge’s clients to access the data they need when they need it,” said Andrew Besheer vice president, Broadridge. “Our significant experience — combined with the ease of use of the Monarch Report Analytics Platform — means we can onboard a new client in as little as one day. In just one day we can put just about any customizable report within the client’s reach quickly, efficiently and securely.

“Our clients have moved from a world with no ability to mine the data trapped in the volumes of their transactional data, to one where they simply ask us to model a new report for them and deliver it next day” continued Besheer.

Monarch gives PostEdge Governance

Nearly all the data managed by PostEdge is impacted by one regulation or another. In a manual environment — or even an in-house environment, brokerages often resort to taking printed, transactional reports and re-keying the data into workable Excel spreadsheets. This approach achieves the end result — access to, and the ability to analyze, critical business data. But it falls far short of true data governance.

PostEdge takes responsibility for all the data governance. It is able to do this because Monarch Enterprise Server extracts the data directly from the source files, and presents it in PostEdge, without anyone touching the data. By having a direct, automated route from the source document to the analysis platform, PostEdge eliminates all risk of manual re-keying and human errors.

In fact, Monarch Enterprise Server delivers a very granular level of security and data assurance — it can govern data access based on flexible business rules and secure the information contained in reports down to the individual transaction level.

Monarch gives Broadridge fast turnaround for client requests

Broadridge’s financial data experts can quickly meet client requests using Monarch Pro. “We’ve developed subject matter expertise in building Monarch models as well as the underlying financial services . We estimate some of our team members have built nearly 9,000 models in Monarch,” said Besheer. “And, since we have such deep experience with Monarch and with the types of data our clients’ need, we often have an existing model that solves a client’s specific request. Our experience with the Monarch Report Analytics platform eliminates the need to ‘recreate the wheel’ each time a request comes in.”

Often, a Broadridge client will come to the firm needing to find the equivalent of a needle in a haystack. The client may think the best way is to initiate an overall search for said needle. Broadridge’s expertise is to use Monarch to build the equivalent of a map to find the needle. A much more efficient and effective way of solving the problem. For one customer, this translated into Broadridge taking a challenge — how to search through hundreds of thousands of pages of reports via multiple text searches - or use Monarch to build a model that included specific “key” words that indicated the type of transaction. Instead of a series of cumbersome semi-automated text searches, the effort took only one day to locate the data. “Since Google we all think search is easy,” said Besheer. “But Google developed algorithms to search specific types of documents for high-level content. Our clients need to ‘search’ a wide variety of documents for very specific transactional content. The only way to do that is to create report models with Monarch.”

Why not change?

It’s tempting to think all organizations race to embrace new technology. Newer, faster, better. But that is actually far from the reality. Most organizations realize the only reason to adopt the latest flavor of technology is because what they have is not working.

For Broadridge, the Monarch Report Analytics Platform continues to work. And work well. “Our clients outsource their processing and document delivery and archival to Broadridge because they have more important things to do with their time — activities that contribute to their core business,” said Besheer.

“Changing technology may sound ‘sexy,’ but in reality it can be a losing proposition. It would be extremely expensive to retrain our customers. And frankly, they don’t want to learn a new system. PostEdge, backed by the Monarch Report Analytic Platform, exceeds their needs for accessing, reporting and information presentation”

Download PDF: