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A few of the firm's financial advisers use hosted data management services from Albridge to consolidate their books of business for client reporting and practice management, according to Abbott. Although Raymond James self-clears brokerage assets, the advisers sell mutual funds that are custodied elsewhere -- Albridge has interfaces to all the major custodians and can gather and consolidate the reps' transactions and positions on a daily basis. (Albridge typically provides this service at an enterprise level for an entire broker-dealer.)
Raymond James also is in the middle of some internal customer data projects. For example, it's building dashboards that financial advisers can refer to when they're talking to retail clients that show the entire relationship rather than individual accounts. "From our client's view, the fact that they made a trade in a given account is less interesting to them than the fact that they made the trade, unless it's a retirement account," Abbott says. "It's more about trying to manage that entire portfolio of accounts."Critical to establishing a complete customer view is the ability to link accounts together that don't necessarily share a tax ID number -- for instance, a client might have a business account, a trust account, a retirement account and a trading account that all add up to one client relationship. This spring, Raymond James will roll out an enhanced relationship-linking application that will do some of the hard work automatically, for example, by finding and linking accounts with the same Social Security numbers, Abbott relates. Financial advisers then will be able to add additional accounts that should be linked but weren't automatically detected, he adds. Once accounts are correctly linked together and dashboard views have been created, "that relationship-based view will then form the basis of everything else we do" (except for compliance systems that must remain account-based), Abbott says. For instance, alongside the customer data integration project, Raymond James is developing a consolidated client reporting application that will generate reports based on that relationship view and ancillary data, such as asset allocation, account activity and statements.
The data warehouse supporting these applications was built using Microsoft SQL reporting services, according to Abbott.
Next, the firm is figuring out how to feed trade information "in a clean and modern way" into other applications, such as compliance systems, Abbott says, noting that one of the challenges is to get data that resides in disparate legacy systems into a format that can be more readily leveraged across the enterprise. "We've accomplished this by parsing the data and replicating it onto a Windows
platform where we can access it via a Web service or through our data warehouse," he explains. "From there we are able to easily integrate into new applications -- in this case, SunGard's Protegent Surveillance software, with more uses to follow." The underpinning technology, Abbott notes, includes NonStop SQL, Microsoft SQL (for data warehousing), GoldenGate (for replication), and a stack of SOA technology, almost exclusively from Microsoft. --P.C.
