AQL is a leading IT consulting and application development firm headquartered in Chicago land with global delivery capabilities. AQL has several Microsoft gold and silver competencies on Microsoft 365 platform and has been providing the highest level of IT expertise and customer satisfaction for the past 15 years. Our services include digital transformation, legacy modernization, cloud implementation & migration, web application development and managed application support managed services. AQL Technologies has implemented several projects with both public and private sector clients across the country.
Northern Trust Bank is the nation’s one of the oldest banking institution offering a multitude of financial services like investment management, wealth management, asset servicing, etc. to customers ranging from high net-worth individuals to top revenue grossing institutions. Over the past few decades, the bank has seen an unprecedent proficiency in its wealth management solution, providing high net-worth clientele with tailored services for financial planning, private banking, estate management, and more. However, like its multiple counterparts in the market, the bank also could not escape being engulfed by the wave of digitization. Requirement was for an efficient digital wealth management application which was cloud-based, informative, easily accessible, transparent, and most importantly fast and secure to use.
Industry: Banking
Microsoft Technologies Used for This Project
- Microsoft 365
- Office 365
- SharePoint
- OneDrive
- Nintex
- PowerApps
- Power BI
Despite chalking out strategy for a digital solution to customer’s wealth management requirement, the bank was experiencing an abundance of challenges, especially in its existing IT ecosystem. The bank’s IT infrastructure was relying on the age–old Lotus Notes application which proved to be inefficient in terms of e-mail communication, custom app development, applications’ performance tracking, and many more. Furthermore, the bank’s IT department was facing the following challenges in developing a fully flexible digital wealth management solution for its customers:
- Dearth of a centralized document management system which resulted in accumulation of duplicate data within the organization.
- Growing reliance on emails as the only mode of communication, collaboration, and storing data.
- Difficulty in accessing real time customer data pertaining to expenditure, investment, and much more.
- Increasing workload on IT department with increasing duplicate data and the need to transfer humongous amount of data.
In fact, the paper based, time taking, and error prone back–office processes undermined customer experiences and even the bank’s reputation in providing world class wealth management solutions to its clients.
Henceforth, the requirement was for a digitized automated solution which would improve data management and subsequently, enhanced customer experience.
The company soon recognized the potential of SharePoint as the most efficient and credible platform to develop a digital wealth management application. However, lack of employee skillset, poor internal IT infrastructure, and budget constraints prompted the bank to outsource its application development project to a third–party vendor. AQL, with its 15+ years of custom application development and SharePoint services was unanimously chosen by the bank’s higher authority for providing required support.
AQL’s team of expert consultants soon sprang into work by developing a detailed understanding of the bank information architecture and existing technologies. A migration plan was strategized and executed using Sharegate to transfer all data and applications from legacy Lotus Notes infrastructure to the cloud –based SharePoint environment. A centralized document management solution was developed using Microsoft SharePoint with custom search feature.
In fact, an agile and accelerated wealth management application was built using SharePoint and Power Apps with the following modules:
- Advisor portal to facilitate optimal recommendations to the customer based on individual portfolio and financial situation.
- AI driven multi-channel client module to display personalized wealth snapshots, investment ideas, portfolio alerts, and more.
- Interactive and user-friendly analytical engine to provide portfolio managers and relationship managers with customer insights.
- Financial taxonomy portal to provide the customer with required information about assets, account statements, financial reports, and more.
Also, the application was configured with Information Retention Management (IRM) settings to protect sensitive customer data and prevent unauthorized accessibility and use. Finally, an automated workflow was designed and created using Nintex application to automate the following processes:
- Digital client on-boarding process with easy to fill data entry forms using Nintex Forms, ensuring collection of right information.
- Automated Know Your Customer data collection, scanning, and analysis to ensure accurate and error-free data processing.
- Compliant and secured investment planning strategy generation using modern forms and SharePoint document library.
To summarize, AQL’s team of developers, designers, testers, and project managers worked together with the bank’s IT department to develop a customized wealth management application around Microsoft SharePoint and Nintex.
Within a record time of 3 months, the company was able to provide a personalized and seamless single channel wealth management experience with instant advisory and self-managed investment capabilities. The application was beneficial both to the customers and financial advisors in terms of ‘what if’ scenarios, reporting capabilities, portfolio assessment, advisory processes, and more. Integration of the application with other in-house applications and automated workflow processes provided a seamless financial support to customers.
In fact, a streamline wealth management system resulted in a whopping number of 2000 customer acquisition per week, faster accounted opening time, about 70% reduction in trade processing costs and many more.
“Thanks to AQL, we finally rose to the digital challenge by leveraging industry insights, modern day technologies and now, we are the most sought after financial advisory providers thriving on operational and functional excellence.”
–
Project Manager, Banking
