Leaper was previously head of business development for North America at DST Global Solutions, until the firm was acquired by SS&C Technology, a provider of financial services software and software-enabled services, last December. Anova is SS&C's investment data management and analytics platform.

Opportunities in new geographies, asset classes, a rise in the mass affluent and aging high net worth Baby Boomers are sparking new demand for wealth management services. 

Wealth management firms, poised to take advantage of these new growth opportunities, are seeking to improve their client experience by leveraging new visualization technology tools. While such new, exciting tools offer immense advantages to wealth management firms – both their advisors and the investors they service – they are entirely dependent upon the integrity of the underlying investment data. 

If the underlying data is inaccessible or, worse yet, inaccurate, it doesn’t matter how it is presented.  Therefore, before embarking on the evaluation of new technology to help service the end-client, wealth management firms need to audit both their investment data and their investment data infrastructure to ensure data accuracy, flexibility and scalability.

Historically, many wealth management firms have followed a “best-of-breed” approach to building or purchasing technology that meets the functional requirements and business process needs of a specific business area. 

While this may provide a level of detail and sophistication in the need that it fills, oftentimes the trade-off is integration with the rest of the IT infrastructure. As a result, many wealth managers have pockets of data, technology and processes trapped in silos, data discrepancies and a lack of data standards across the enterprise. The more an organization grows or would like to grow, the more limiting this type of infrastructure becomes. 

We experienced this challenge first-hand with what has become one of our largest wealth management clients.  Their plan to grow their mass affluent client base was to build an enhanced personal internet banking platform that would consolidate each customers’ entire wealth holdings – including cash deposits and investments – into one single screen that could be accessed anytime, anywhere through an online portal and mobile devices.

This “Wealth Dashboard” would enable clients to visualize their positions, making sense of their investments more easily and in near real-time, while enabling their front-line relationship managers to better engage customers.  But it was simply not possible to build because their underlying investment data infrastructure was fragmented. It could not unify the large amounts of client transaction volumes, historical data and market data needed to feed into their conceptualized portal.

The firm was able to solve this problem by integrating a centralized, scalable data hub capable of handling huge data volumes, intercepting data from all asset classes from a number of different sources and transforming data from these multiple sources into a single data model.  This data hub now provides a holistic, accurate and near real-time view of all investment data and has essentially become the underpinnings of the infrastructure that their wealth dashboard is based upon.

Our client experience tells us that in order for wealth managers to successfully deploy new, innovative visualization tools to retain and capture new revenue streams, they need to examine how good their data is, how well the infrastructure can scale with an increase in transaction volumes and how flexibly the technology can integrate with other applications. Only then will innovation sponsor growth.