European financial services major slashes IT spend by about 70% via rollout of a single analytics and business development platform across 30 booking centers

Client background

The company offers advisory, banking and wealth management services to high net worth clients. It has operations globally and covers institutional investors, individual and corporates alike. The company boasts of an employee strength of more than 50,000.

Industry landscape

It is necessary for large wealth management firms to have a robust sales support and business development platform to remain one step ahead of competition. It brings direct business benefits and has topline impact. Firms are, thus, investing in building platforms that automate manual processes for the client advisor and provide a holistic overview of their business books.

The cost of building and maintaining disparate local IT infrastructure across multiple booking centers can be huge and run into hundreds of millions of dollars. Wealth management firms are, therefore, looking for unified platforms that help client advisors plan business development activities for both prospects as well as existing clients, bring net new money and improve client retention.

The opportunity

The client, which had 30 booking centers, was grappling with the problem of every location having its own platform to manage sales and data analytics, which led to inconsistencies in presentation and interpretation of data. The client, thus, wanted to have a single functional and application landscape for their wealth management business across all the 30 booking centers for 2 primary reasons:

  • To ensure massive reduction in IT spend across locations, and
  • Bring uniformity in product offerings, servicing and support for all the locations.

The solution

Wipro partnered with the client to create a strategic sales analytics and business development platform for their global wealth management program. We helped build a single platform that was scalable and could be used by all locations, thereby resulting in significant cost savings. The applications and functionalities across the locations were standardized.

We helped the client:

  • Develop a single instance platform that can receive detail and summary- level data from 30 booking centers and aggregate them based on customized reporting requirements.
  • Identify, create and track opportunities for sales and net new money
  • Create management reports that give a holistic view to the senior management on the performance of various desks
  • Implement robust performance-tuning techniques to create a scalable solution that remains relevant in the long term
  • Create various user personas for client advisors, assistants, desk heads, regional heads to provide profile-based access mechanisms
  • Create a comprehensive set of test scenarios to cover a major portion of the 250+ in-scope business processes that are impacted by this strategic program

Business impact

  • Developed a unified next generation analytics and reporting platform for the APAC and Europe regions that manage a total of CHF 630+ billion of invested assets
  • Facilitated adoption of the new platform that can handle more than 40,000 clients, over 52,000 portfolios and 36,000+ business relationships
  • Helped achieve about 70% reduction in IT spend by managing multiple region-based platforms
  • Implemented profile-based access mechanisms that were in line with the regulatory obligations for 1000+ and 1300+ client advisors in APAC and Europe, respectively
  • Reduced operational costs and fragmented IT patchwork in various locations
  • Streamlined running of the entire wealth management business at the CXO level