Tracking thousands of investment positions for several hundred clients at a time is no easy task, especially in the face of tens of thousands of daily marketplace events. One global financial services firm wanted to apply advanced analytics to the data streaming into its wealth management practice so financial advisors could use it to deliver more personalized investment advice. The goal was to reduce information overload, and at the same time, on a day-to-day basis, empower wealth managers to quickly identify the investment opportunities best suited to the specific needs of their customers. The firm knew it needed to find a way to unlock analytic insights from data silos and make them easily accessible to the people who could benefit from them at the point of decision.

The firm chose TIBCO® Data Science because the platform provides a way to make analytics relevant to the business. Within TIBCO Data Science, data algorithms can be tailored to specific business requirements and, most importantly, directly integrated into applications, like the CRM system that wealth managers rely on daily to do their jobs.

Insights Enabling Investment Scoring and Targeted Recommendations

Acting as a centralized insight engine, TIBCO Data Science is allowing the firm to rapidly analyze a large volume of incoming data—everything from information generated by research and product groups to external sources of market data—and score investment opportunities based on their relevancy to specific investors. "We're giving people on the business side the freedom to ask questions of their data without fear of a long and complex process," explains the firm's head of investment platforms.

Insightful findings are funneled directly to advisors who can use the information to make targeted recommendations customized to their clients' unique situations. For example, one score might prompt a swap idea while another might lead an advisor to recommend liquidating a fund.

Greater Participation, Advanced Analytics Without Expensive Hires

With a flexible environment that includes drag and drop workflows as well as an extensibility framework, TIBCO Data Science makes it easy to create, test, and adapt analytic scoring models, empowering data experts as well as business stakeholders to take part in the data science process. As a result, the firm has been able to deploy sophisticated analyses without hiring expensive PhDs or additional data scientists.

A key benefit of the TIBCO Data Science Platform is that it democratizes access to advanced analytics across the organization. "When only the data scientist has the answer, you aren't going to get very far," says the head of investment platforms. "The key is to drive data and analytics as far down into the business as possible, at scale."

Time Savings, Better Application of Human Skill

Before Spotfire, financial advisors spent significant time searching for and manually analyzing the information they needed to make a recommendation. Generating a stock idea would typically require more than a dozen steps and at least an hour of research time, including calls to the capital markets desk, visits to the firm's research portal, and reviews of other key sources of information. Now, TIBCO Data Science captures and analyzes all data and serves relevant intelligence directly to the firm's 16,000+ advisors, bringing information to the decision-makers rather than putting the onus on them to find it. The recommendation cycle time has reduced from hours to just minutes. Financial advisors can now focus their skills on what they do best—evaluating investment ideas and making recommendations to clients.

Continuous Improvement

TIBCO Data Science has also enabled an analytics governance process whereby scoring models are constantly measured to ensure that the insights generated are indeed adding value. Feedback loops allow users to weigh in constantly on what is working and what is not. Because the platform allows for rapid iteration of new analytics models, the firm can test ideas on a regular basis, learn from failures, and quickly adapt to changing business conditions.

The TIBCO Data Science collaborative and flexible environment ensures that the firm can continue to innovate, improve their models, and focus on how the practice can realize the greatest value from its data.