Signal Hub for Wealth Management Overview of Design and
Background The Signal Hub for Wealth Management, which Opera Solutions has deployed to the wealth management industry, has required combining a variety of very large datasets, extracting the valuable predictive and descriptive information (or Signals ) from this data, and making Signals actionable by using advanced visualization and providing clear prescriptive recommendations ( buy, sell, explore, etc. ) to financial advisors and their managers. Currently, the Signal Hub platform is in production with the following four applications supporting 30,000+ users and $1T+ assets under management: 1. Performance Aggregator Dashboard 2. Investment Matching Engine 3. Peer Intelligence Dashboard 4. Portfolio Surveillance Alerts To maximize financial advisors adoption of this technology, Opera Solutions applied its Man + Machine framework for each of the above applications. That is, it used a design that employs visualization and nonintrusive integration into the existing workflow. The Signal Hub provides a flow of best next actions to achieve these key goals: 1. Best matching of products to customers (ranked by quality, relevance, and benefit of a product to a customer portfolio) 2. Best next action (managed over time) to hit financial planning targets (for example, cash income per month in retirement) 3. Best next action at any given time for portfolio optimization to meet the customer s target asset allocation For each application, this document describes the salient design and deployment features that have resulted in its successful adoption.
3 Application 1: Performance Aggregator Dashboard While industry-accepted ways of comparing one account to another are available, historically, standard methods for comparing one financial advisor to another have not been available. Apples-to-apples comparisons have proven difficult to make, given the differences in investment objectives and risk tolerance among different FA s books of business. To address this, Opera Solutions developed a novel application: the Performance Aggregator Dashboard. Functions of the Performance Aggregator Dashboard: Measures and analyzes the investment performance of financial advisors Compares each advisor s investment performance with peers, top performers, and external benchmarks Delineates the root causes of performance and pinpoints areas for improvement Delivering this application required developing an algorithm to normalize the performance of many different portfolios and investment approaches. This computationally intensive normalization across 15,000 financial advisor books requires tens of billions of performance and risk metrics to be calculated each month, as well as the capability to deliver distilled output to 30,000 users and create an intelligent environment for performance assessment. We designed this application to provide apples-to-apples comparisons of advisor performance across multiple areas and dimensions. The financial advisor can start with an integrated bookof-business view and drill down to customers and their positions using a highly intuitive performance dashboard with custom-developed UI. The flexible interface allows FAs to see and compare their performance via heat maps and other visualizations, as well as to understand what is driving their over- or under-performance. This application has had an excellent adoption rate. Financial advisors are very competitive, and this application provides the means to know where each FA stands among his or her peers. Moreover, it provides a way to understand what contributes to individual performance and what each needs to do to improve his or her standing. Application 2: Investment Matching Engine Today, product groups within wealth management firms use simple rules-based engines to broadcast a product or investment idea. Unfortunately, rulesbased engines create many false positives unattractive ideas that end up clogging financial advisors in-boxes with content that is not relevant to a customer, an account, or the FA. To address this, Opera Solutions developed the Investment Matching Engine, a pattern-recognition based recommendation engine that has the power to transform the industry.
4 Functions of the Investment Matching Engine: Helps financial advisors proactively identify potential investment ideas through a best next action algorithm Serves up potential investment ideas that are targeted or customized to each FA s specific clients and book of business Sifts through all possible options to deliver the most relevant and powerful suggestions, given each customer s investment objectives and risk tolerance as well as the intellectual capital of the firm Serves up a daily prioritized list of recommendations for each FA that takes into account the following key factors: the relevance of the idea to the FA the benefit to the account the quality of the idea Every day, this application receives dozens of data feeds, including holdings, transactions, performance, and research content, that are ingested into Signal Hub. The application uses pattern-based analytics to automatically identify and address data quality issues. Then, a Signal Library is applied to this incoming data feed to extract 9,000+ Signals at the account, customer, FA, product, and market levels. These Signals are organized as Customer DNA, Financial Advisor DNA, Product DNA, and Market DNA. Next, a self-learning algorithm matches product/ investment DNA to customer/account DNA to rank order a set of actions for each account and each FA. This engine generates over 80MM insights every day in four hours by using a Hadoop-based distributed-computing infrastructure to process terabytes of data for millions of accounts. We designed this application to simply provide the Top 10 recommended actions for each FA and customer within the FA workflow. FAs can access it through their Book of Business View or through a customer view. Irrespective of the view, the initial page provides a quick lookup of relevant information for each action and enables the FA to take the recommended action with just two clicks. This application not only provides recommendations but also provides a rationale for the recommendation that is auto-generated by the algorithm. In addition, the FA has the ability to rate the idea and provide feedback to the system to make the system more accurate over time. All the accounts for this client Show the ideas that affect the accounts of the client, sorted by score in account level
5 Application 3: Peer Intelligence Dashboard Through most of the industry, financial advisors have to call other financial advisors (their peers) to unearth best practices regarding asset allocation, product recommendation, or cllent service. Opera Solutions used its Signal Hub to develop a solution, the Peer Intelligence Dashboard, to provide intelligence around FA behavior in an easy-to-use interface. Functions of the Peer Intelligence Dashboard: Allows FAs to use up to three filters to define those FA and account peer groups for which they would like to review peer activity Provides up-to-date insights into the most popular transactions and trends in asset allocation, as well as other peer behaviors such as pricing, client service, etc. A very sophisticated machine learning clustering algorithm is used to process millions of transactions from millions of accounts every day to extract behaviors from data. To power this application, about 500,000 clusters over various time scales (one day, one week, three months, five months, one year, etc.) are generated in a few hours every day; these are processed on a Hadoop-based distributedcomputing infrastructure. We designed this application to provide peer behaviors such as Top Buys, Top Sells, and Top Holdings. The user can slice and dice the data by accounts, FA, and a variety of other filters. For example, the user can find out which FAs have a $100MM+ book, who is in the top performance quintile, and who is buying and selling today or for any time window in the past. This application got wide adoption within four weeks from launch because it provided an entirely new and necessary capability: intelligence from actual behaviors derived from millions of transactions and thousands of FAs all available with just a few clicks. FAs use a set of filters to define what asset classes and strategies they want to track The application provides them with insight into the best-performing peers for their selected topics
6 Application 4: Portfolio Surveillance Alerts Currently, portfolio surveillance for suitability, abnormal activity, exposure, etc., is done by separate, rules-based engines. This results in many false positives, all of which need to be investigated. Moreover, rules-based systems cannot easily keep up with new regulations, and they become difficult to manage as regulations change and grow. To address this problem, Opera Solutions used its Signal Hub to develop a pattern-recognition based application that can provide continuous surveillance without a high rate of false positives or rules that grow stale. Functions of Portfolio Surveillance Alerts: Monitor accounts for basic housekeeping, such as maturing bonds, excess cash, and rating downgrades to enable FAs to proactively manage accounts Flag violations on suitability, exposure, risk, etc., so business and risk management leaders can enforce best practices Detect anomalies in account activity from a compliance perspective Every day, this application receives dozens of data feeds, including holdings, transaction, performance, and research content, that are ingested into the Signal Hub. Then, a Signal Library is applied to detect policy violations on suitability, compliance, etc., as well as to detect portfolios exceeding set thresholds for risk and exposure. This engine currently generates over 20MM such alerts every day by processing terabytes of data for millions of accounts within a few hours, using a Hadoop-based distributed-computing infrastructure. This application is integrated seamlessly into the Investment Matching Engine application as well as to FA s desktops. However, alerts are displayed in a separate tab from the best next actions. These alerts are also aggregated for management by branch, region, district, country, and more. This application rank-orders the alerts and provides rationale so that FAs can prioritize their actions. (For example, an alert that applies to 100 accounts will be ranked higher than an alert affecting 10 accounts.) Also, these alerts are made available to management to ensure that FAs take the right actions. For more information, please contact us at interest@operasolutions.com or 1-855-OPERA-22. You can also visit our website at www.operasolutions.com and subscribe to our blog at blog.operasolutions.com. Profit from Big Data flow New York Jersey City Boston San Diego London Shanghai New Delhi ABOUT OPERA SOLUTIONS, LLC Opera Solutions (www.operasolutions.com, @OperaSolutions) provides Big Data predictive and prescriptive analytics, delivered as an ongoing service, to business, healthcare, and government organizations globally. With approximately 180 machine learning scientists among its 600 employees, Opera Solutions is a global leader in using advanced techniques to extract value from Big Data. Its solutions, software, and services combine science with technology and domain expertise, providing new, Big Data fueled pathways to profit and productivity. Opera Solutions is headquartered in Jersey City, NJ, with other offices in North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information, visit our website or call 1-855-OPERA-22.