Financial Information Delivery Engine

Initiative

The Global Corporate and Investment Banking (GCIB) division of a Fortune 10 financial institution was faced with a difficult challenge: Building a state-of-the-art application to enable creation and delivery of custom data extracts to third-party fund management clients, while remaining flexible enough to allow for changing customer needs and market practices. The Project Champion and Senior Vice President of GCIB described the challenge as "looking to significantly expand and improve our client offerings while simultaneously decreasing overhead costs."

Prior to the project initiative, each client's custom data extracts were developed and managed as separate applications. This resulted in hundreds of largely redundant, non-standard programs and skyrocketing application life cycle maintenance costs and staff requirements. In addition, clients were demanding increasingly robust capabilities and faster turnaround times for extracts and enhancements.

Solution

Incandescent hit the ground running immediately with expert analysis to quickly identify the redundancies across existing applications as well as custom client requirements. Applying their proprietary Enterprise Project Methodology, and leveraging Ab Initio data integration software, Incandescent consultants were able to architect, develop and deploy a cutting-edge dynamic data integration and delivery engine utilizing meta-programming techniques within the Ab Initio software suite. "It was certainly a tall order," acknowledged the GCIB executive sponsor "but Incandescent was there every step of the way with the targeted knowledge and expertise to help us make it happen."

The new application, Client Information Delivery (CID), allows investment fund data extracts to be defined and generated on-the-fly in real-time based upon required extract formats and processing metadata. Custom extracts can now be defined by the Citigroup client directly, scheduled or triggered, and delivered via a secure publish and subscribe infrastructure established with recipient clients. This key capability changed the skill set required to create extracts from power users to non-power users. Furthermore, should the need arise for specific custom processing outside the scope of the CID application, its modular design ensures easy integration of custom Ab Initio programs into the framework.

Results

The GCIB Project Champion summed up the successful partnership with Incandescent noting that "Incandescent was the cornerstone of our success on the CID project; they helped us to consolidate hundreds of redundant, costly applications into a flexible, manageable, and scaleable extract framework. Now, we're adding new clients without adding to our overhead, or impacting service to our existing clients." As a result, the CID application enables a significant business opportunity for the Fortune 10 financial services institution to market and provide their world-class fund management data services without limit.

The CID application was delivered on-time and on-budget. The application service has already rolled out to several fund management clients, and new clients continue to be added regulalry without increased technology development cost.