Client Profile:
- Global Full-Service Bank.
- Undergone a significant merger activity in previous 24 months.
- Multiple business lines utilizing outsourced solutions for brokerage and settlement and clearing services.
- Manages more than $250 billion in client assets within Private Bank unit.
- Approximately 1.4m accounts with daily trading volume of 20k – 30k trades.
- A client base with primarily managed accounts and limited self-directed management.
Situation and Objectives:
- Merger integration had left the firm with several separate technology platforms and outsourcing providers across the full retail and private client bases.
- The client’s efforts to move to a best-in-class self-clearing solution provided the catalyst to bring outsourced operations in-house to reduce infrastructure complexity, vendor dependencies and operating costs.
- A concurrent initiative to develop an enhanced wealth management workstation was underway to drive and enable an advisor-focused wealth management model but required full front-to-back integration with the clearance and settlement platform(s).
- The large scale integration effort presented by moving to an in-sourced solution portended significant business and financial risks and required extensive program management and testing to promote seamless execution and zero impact to clients (wealth management advisors and individual investors).
- The client lacked the expertise in program/project management and governance needed to manage and integrate across 40+ technology development, business, operational readiness, QA, and external stakeholder work streams including integration with merged entities and 3rd party service providers.
- The scale of the effort required extensive business readiness and training coordination:
- Front-office ad advisor training
- Back office and technology – end-to-end
- User guides for all new and changed applications
- Projected business growth drove the need to develop a “model office” for complete front-to-back testing with repeatable processes, flexibility and scalability for business processes and systems with a high degree of client touch-points.
Core Need:
- A strategic partner that could provide leadership, industry expertise, and resources to enable the successful planning and execution of the transformation from a fully disclosed to a self-clearing operating model.
Approach:
- Developed the organizational structures and framework under which all transformation activities would be managed and executed.
- Collaborated with client functional and technical teams to build end-to-end implementation, conversion, and test plans.
- Led the testing, development of training materials, organizational change, and overall execution of the migration to the new technology platform and operating model.Establish Program Management Office
- Implemented structure for integrated program planning across all work streams.
- Established guidelines, rules, metrics, and templates to monitor progress and create visibility to interdependencies across work streams.
- Assembled overall program plan with risk tracking and mitigation tools.
- Developed and implemented program communication strategy and plan to enable regular program status reporting to all levels of the organization.
- Tailored standardized methodologies for project management to promote consistency of all projects and work streams.Conversion and Implementation Planning
- Developed a detailed Conversion Roadmap and Timeline to manage a large-scale conversion effort to a new clearing model.
- Built business and technology resource plan for conversion activities.
- Developed detailed ‘playbook’ for conversion activities across all work streams and stakeholders.
- Led ‘mock conversions’ to minimize risk or issues that may arise during conversion.
- Established standardized processes and tools to identify, manage, and report program risks including: issues, change controls, mitigation strategy, severity scoring, owners and target resolution dates.Testing, Training and Conversion Execution
- Developed a robust program that provides the training and supporting documentation relevant to each of the stakeholder/user groups involved in the brokerage business.
- Developed detailed user guides to support new and refined business processes, document new systems/enhancements and improve overall solution adoption.
- Facilitated the delivery of training to stakeholder/user groups to drive operational and technology readiness for the conversion.
- Developed and implemented program communication strategy and plan to enable regular program status reporting to all levels of the organization.
- Supported testing and training by providing mapped data for conversion with data and transport knowledge.
- Led conversion of static, trading, reporting and historical data.
