CASE STUDY. Accelerate M&A with a Modern Information Management Platform

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1 CASE STUDY Accelerate M&A with a Modern Information Management Platform 1

2 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Cetera Financial Group ( Cetera ) is the second-largest independent financial advisor network in the United States by number of advisors, and a leading provider of retail services to the investment programs of banks and credit unions. Accelerated the process of consolidating data and creating a master product list from 3 to 5 days to 1 day Through its network of independent firms, Cetera empowers the delivery of professional financial advice to individuals, families, and company retirement plans across the country. Cetera offers its independent and institutions-based advisors the benefits of a large, established broker-dealer through advisor support resources such as award-winning wealth management and advisory platforms, practice management support, and innovative technology. Improved data quality from 84% to 92% to more accurately map commissions to advisors assets under management Reduced the number of client address duplicates to save costs in mass mailings Improved new data onboarding from 1 day to 10 minutes 2

3 The Complexity of Data and Operations at Cetera Data management for Cetera s Enterprise Data Hub (EDH) was a highly complex process, given numerous acquisitions and the massive amount of incoming data from multiple data sources, including Oracle, SQL Servers, Informix, and public sources such as MorningStar. Prior to Paxata, updating Cetera s EDH to consolidate data after a merger involved a convoluted, two-step process. The first step entailed Cetera s IT group taking asset data from various data sources collected through acquisitions and mapping them into Cetera s central asset classification system on a single Excel spreadsheet. Because the asset data came from a wide, disparate group of sources, asset classification was complicated and time-consuming. The second step was to share the Excel spreadsheet with Cetera s team of subject matter experts (SMEs) and have SMEs verify, validate, and edit their respective classifications on the spreadsheet. The SMEs would then send a copy of the spreadsheet back to the IT group, who would be responsible for updating the master Excel copy and reconciling any differences while dealing with version control, different formatting, and other problematic issues. This highly-manual process of validating and updating would be repeated as different SMEs then classified an asset as a mutual fund versus a variable annuity. Once agreement was reached, IT would change the DDL in Informatica, test, and verify the results. For any small update, this involved a 3 to 5 day effort. 3

4 Searching for a Solution to Empower 9100 Financial Advisors In order to support its growing network of 9,100 financial advisors, with a comprehensive EDH where they could accurately and quickly manage their book of business and access up-to-date information on product, assets, and clients, IT needed to act quickly and look for a solution that eliminated the laborious, timeconsuming, and manual iterations between SMEs and the lines of business. To do so, Cetera started looking for new information management technologies that offered: Low or no coding requirements Data profiling and integration capabilities to link different systems Process repeatability to extend to additional brokerdealers and new acquisitions Ad-hoc data profiling for one-off requests Data validation against 3rd party sources Built-in governance for compliance reasons As such, Cetera initiated a proof-of-value (POV) project to evaluate Paxata s Adaptive Information Platform and Self-Service Data Prep Application. 4

5 Proof-of-Value and Why Paxata A key objective of the POV project was to find a self-service data preparation platform that would enable Cetera s business and data teams to spend more of their time analyzing information assets to solve problems and uncover new business opportunities, rather than spending it preparing data for analytics. The POV centered on three use cases: GDC (Gross Dealer Concession) and Assets Mapping: This involved linking bonus commissions to SmartWorks (Cetera s CRM system for advisors to manage their book of business, access accounts, place trades, retrieve client notes, and review performance reports) and generating a report on GDC and Assets Under Management at an account/client level. Objectives were to increase the data-matching accuracy, reduce the processing time, and publish the results to a table in the EDH for use in future requests. Mass Client Mailing: This involved reconciling contacts across 10 broker dealers for a mass mailing to clients, profiling the data, and resolving any data quality issues. Objectives were to reduce the complexity of the existing process, scale the solution to support more broker dealers, and make the data and process reusable for future mailings. Compliance Auditing: This involved linking transactions between the Mutual Fund and Automated Customer Account Transfer (ACAT) systems, determining the remaining shares, and identifying which accounts transferred or closed. Objectives were to reduce the processing time of bringing new data sources together and evaluate how to capture the business rules within the data. 5

6 The Results The results achieved by using Paxata included: GDC and Assets Mapping Reduced the processing time from 1 week to 3 hours Increased the data-matching accuracy/confidence rating from 84% to 92% Created a master system of record Introduced a repeatable process, with every update taking only 10 minutes instead of 1 week with the prior set up Enabled faster turn-around for ad-hoc requests Mass Client Mailing Processing time was reduced from 1 month to 1 day Data profiling and profiling against third party sources detected duplicate addresses which were previously unidentified Business rules/logic were captured for reuse Created a master system of record Reduced the total cost to the mailing program Compliance Auditing Quickly linked together different data sources Aggregation allowed comparing data at the right level (e.g. account) to identify compliance gaps Data quality rules identified errors in classification codes Extracted and standardized values in a repeatable manner Iterative approach allowed for significantly reduced development times The most impactful part of using Paxata is the tremendous time savings we ve experienced. The ability to look at millions of rows and to profile that data in multiple ways quickly and easily we weren t able to do that before. NANDA ALAGESAN, DATA ANALYST, CETERA FINANCIAL GROUP As a result of its highly successful POV, Cetera selected Paxata as its self-service data preparation software provider. 6

7 With Paxata Paxata delivered measurable business value and ROI for Cetera by reducing the time required for classifying and preparing source data from 3 to 5 days to 1 day. Paxata created a master system of record for the product/asset data for each broker s book of business. The data transformation logic is recorded in Paxata and any new data quickly flows through the logic and updates the EDH with a refresh time of 10 minutes. These updates in the past took as long as 1 week. The manual and slow exchange between IT and SMEs using Excel is now a lot faster. Previously, even making small changes to the EDH, such as adding a column, took as long as 5 days to accomplish. Today with Paxata, making a small change to the EDH can be done in as little as an hour. Faster time-to-value positively impacted savings in marketing promotions and mass mailings. The previous, manual process involved taking data in different formats from multiple spreadsheets and consolidating it into a single format for mailing, an estimated 3½ days process. The same results can now be achieved in just a few hours. Accuracy has improved as well, with intelligence and machine learning techniques that Paxata uses underneath the covers. For example, the join confidence in mapping asset information from various systems has increased from 84% to 92%. This directly impacts commission payouts. 7

8 Cetera s Use of Paxata We are able to make informed, data-driven decisions much more quickly today by using Paxata. What used to take us 3 to 5 days to get data into a format suitable for decision-making, now takes us as little as an hour. MICHELLE RIGGS, INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY TEAM LEAD, CETERA FINANCIAL GROUP FINANCIAL GROUP 8

9 Companies around the globe rely on Paxata to get smart about information. Paxata is the pioneer that intelligently empowers all business consumers to transform raw data into ready information, instantly and automatically, with an enterprise-grade, self-service data preparation application and machine learning platform. Our Adaptive Information Platform weaves data into an information fabric from any source and any cloud to create trusted insights. Business consumers use clicks, not code to achieve results in minutes, not months. With Paxata, Be an Information Inspired Business. Paxata is headquartered in Redwood City, California with offices in New York, Ohio, Washington D.C., and Singapore. Paxata Headquarters 305 Walnut Street Redwood City, CA PAXATA paxata.com 2017 Paxata, Inc. All Rights Reserved 9