Insights

The Problem

A fast-growing medium sized financial services company was running dozens of trade requests per week to the firm's trade desk. The trade team would trade the client accounts on behalf of the individual advisors who made the requests. All trade requests were being conducted over email, clogging everyone's inbox. Further, the compliance standards that the company operates within calls for explicit records of all trades requested. In order to complete this step thoroughly, someone (or multiple someones) would have to record these requests centrally -- another manual step in the process. One more caveat: the trades being requested would often need an approval from a second member of the advising team, per industry and firm best practices. This created a network of email threads, the possibility of incomplete information and then clarification questions being thrown in every direction, just to get a trade cleared properly.

The Solution

For this company, we stepped in, got to know the problem intimately, and mapped out possible solutions. Ultimately, we were able to utilize a combination of software subscriptions the firm was already paying for and not using, to create a custom automated system that dramatically cut down on manual work and is still in use by the company today. Only three years later, the system has successfully recorded and routed nearly 10,000 requests automatically, freeing up hundreds of total hours between multiple roles at the company.