Forecasting the Future
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BI Case Study Financial Firm Sees Data Clearly with Dashboards
Linda L. Briggs
“We have tight purse strings and a laser focus,” says Shawn Spott, vice president of marketing research and strategic analysis for RBC Wealth Management, explaining the company’s small-firm approach to spending despite being one of the largest full-service securities firms in the U.S. His comment also helps explain RBC’s initial attraction to—and great success with—an on-demand BI solution that the company has used to build a series of dashboards for its brokers that has saved money right from the start.
RBC Wealth Management is a division of RBC Capital Markets Corp., which is itself a subsidiary of Royal Bank of Canada; its U.S. headquarters are in Minneapolis. RBC is growing rapidly, both organically and through acquisitions. Clients include households, small businesses, corporations, government entities, and not-for-profit organizations in need of such RBC products and services as wealth management strategies, retirement planning, and insurance.
The reporting and analytics dashboard solution RBC is using, from Birst Inc., offered an unparallel cost-benefit ratio—in large part because Birst is offered as an on-demand service over the Internet. That saved RBC significant money right away, since instead of having to install and maintain the product and data (along with supporting hardware) on site, Spott and his team of data analysts rely on Birst to keep the dashboard software running and updated, and to securely and reliably store and back up the RBC data that populates the dashboard displays.
The Challenge Spott’s small team of analysts—who essentially function as the market research group at RBC—works to supply data to RBC’s 2,200 brokers, some 500 of whom are now using the Birst dashboards. The brokers interact with customers daily, helping clients manage their portfolios and select additional financial products from RBC. Spott’s group also handles traditional market research, including surveys, focus groups, and data analysis using products from SAS and others that draw from RBC’s Teradata data warehouse.
The Birst dashboards are designed for end users; they pull data monthly from the RBC data warehouse to offer brokers a complete picture of their current clients. The graphical displays also help brokers find additional sales opportunities and let them compare their work with that of colleagues.
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As such, the dashboards have proved enormously popular and have been used in unexpected ways.
“It’s the only tool on the broker desktop that gives them a view of all their households and all their accounts,” Spott says. “They use it frequently, just to see where they are.” That’s a much more tactical, daily use than was originally anticipated—and it has been highly effective. “We envisioned [brokers using] it for their six-month plans, as a lead-generation tool,” Spott says, but they’ve used it in different ways. The popularity and usefulness of the tool, he adds, is “phenomenal.”
Essentially, the Birst dashboards convert the many spreadsheet pages that brokers used to sort through monthly into 25 to 30 graphical dashboard screens that summarize the data quickly and allow brokers to drill deeper in several areas. For example, a dashboard might allow a user to easily drill down and produce a report that includes only clients over a certain age, those with a given amount of assets, or those who have previously purchased a particular RBC product.
The value of the dashboards to RBC is clear, Spott says. Each of three critical measurements the company tracks carefully—revenue per household, new money deposited into accounts, and size of accounts— has improved with the brokers using the dashboards compared with those who aren’t. The popularity of the dashboards points to their value
as well. “People keep asking for it,” Spott says. “We are signing up new brokers every week.”
Before RBC began using the Birst product, analysts in Spott’s office built spreadsheets by hand monthly, using an internally built Microsoft Excel–based tool. The spreadsheets were distributed to brokers. In a word, capacity was the fundamental problem with that approach. Simply preparing the data took too much time, leaving Spott’s team with little or no time to actually analyze it.
“[The process] was way too cumbersome,” he says. Staff was spending so much time manipulating data that there was no time to add value or perspective.
“We would send out data, but we could never help people actually read it. ... After all, our job isn’t about compiling and delivering data; it’s about helping people interpret the data.”
The SaaS Solution Although the previous system was time-consuming for analysts and unlikely to be able to support anticipated growth, it was nevertheless established and highly relied upon. That made changing tools a tough decision in some ways.
“We basically said, this is the end of its life cycle and we can’t really push this technology much further,” Spott explains. “If the firm’s going to grow, we’re not going be able to support it [with this software].”
Several months were spent weighing the buy-versus-build equation and assessing what the market offered. Although several proprietary software solutions existed for financial services firms, their high cost made them unrealistic for RBC, where tight budgets are common.
The firm briefly discussed the possibility of building its own data delivery product, Spott says, but a Birst demonstration quickly convinced RBC of the viability of its particular solution. It was immediately evident from the demonstration, Spott says, that Birst had “plenty of out-of-the-box functionality” to get the project moving quickly. It was also clearly a mature, on-demand product that would work well over the Internet. At the point when Birst was chosen, which was several years ago, other BI products the team weighed
“didn’t seem to have a fully developed Web strategy.”
Because RBC has made several acquisitions and may make more in the future, Spott says, the solution’s versatility was critical. “We really wanted to make sure we had a tool that wasn’t going to be platform- dependent,” he stresses. The chosen software would need to work even if the firm’s data warehouse software
The popularity
of the dashboards
points to their value.
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or other back-end solutions changed over time.
The software-as-a-service (SaaS) aspect of Birst was important. With all of the acquisition activity taking place, Spott was brutally realistic about his group’s chances for commanding sustained IT resources over the long haul.
“Just getting IT’s attention was going to be very difficult,” he admits. For that reason, his group of analysts wanted something simple enough to configure and use without heavy IT involvement. Although IT was involved in helping to get the Birst product up and running, that involvement was minimal compared with the requirements for an on-site rollout of a BI product.
“The software-as-a-service model gave us the ability to [avoid] shelving this project and waiting for [IT’s attention],” Spott says. “We could get it up and running in parallel to other activities going on in IT.”
The monthly data extraction from the Teradata warehouse for the dashboard data involves a series of tasks. Extracts are created around eight major subject area files that contain the complete account records and the security master file, along with information on the brokers. The files pass through encryption software on both the sending and receiving ends, and RBC data remains on site with Birst for use by the dashboards.
IT involvement has proved to be minimal, especially since Birst consultants helped to get the initial dashboards built. Spott’s staff, on the other hand, took care of issues such as data mapping and data definitions, since they were clearly familiar with the business side. Birst consultants then stepped in and helped build the actual dashboard screens.
To create new dashboards, Spott works with Birst just as he might an in-house IT team. He draws up requirements, obtains a price for the service from Birst, and balances that cost against his budget. RBC currently creates between four and eight new dashboards a year, depending on acquisitions and internal activity.
Vetting Security Data security is paramount at RBC, so the SaaS model itself came under heavy scrutiny initially. Along with standard regulatory policies that must be followed, Spott stresses,
“our corporate policies [on privacy and security] are very, very strict.”
For RBC, the concept of having an off-site firm store financial records as part of a reporting and analytics tool required extensive discussion, especially in the initial project phases several years ago, when SaaS was a far less mature concept.
“There was plenty of concern early on,” Spott says. “We had to educate a lot of people.”
Working closely with Birst, Spott says, RBC ironed out security issues such as encryption and the handling of data backups. Much of the discussion revolved around standard issues that come up in working out a contract, but Spott wanted to make doubly sure that he and his staff, along with RBC’s IT group and senior management, were comfortable with the fact that “at the end of the day, some data center down in Texas has all of our accounts.”
Now, with three solid years of data exchange behind it and not a single security incident of any sort, RBC is eminently comfortable with the SaaS nature of its chosen solution. n
Linda L. Briggs writes about technol ogy in corporate, education, and govern- ment markets. She is based in San Diego. lbriggs@lindabriggs.com
Data security is
paramount at RBC, so
the SaaS model itself
came under heavy
scrutiny initially.
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