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How smarter search helps advisors find answers.
One search tool replaced the slow hunt across disconnected systems with direct access to the right information.
advisors using the platform
improvement in search response times
of advisors use search to access various functional capabilities
Wealth advisors need to quickly answer questions when clients ask them. Finding the right information they need to answer those questions can be difficult, especially if it means searching across systems and relying on a sluggish platform.
One leading wealth management firm wanted to give its advisors a new way to search. Its existing platform could no longer deliver the speed, relevance or usability that advisors expected. The goal was simple: give more than 200,000 advisors a faster path to the information they rely on every day.
The firm worked with Publicis Sapient to build a new wealth management platform that could bring information from multiple sources together and make it easier to discover.
The company needed a new, future-proof wealth management platform that would scale with the business and they needed the platform to be up and running in six to eight months.
A key requirement was a class-leading, contextual search experience. Search is the most frequently used functionality of wealth management platforms, and with Google setting expectations for speed, the client wanted millisecond-fast search response times with ranked results.
To enable a fast time-to-market, we looked for an out-of-the-box solution featuring open-source industry-standard functionalities to avoid vendor lock-in.
We chose Elastic Stack, an industry-standard solution already used by Walmart, eBay, and T-Mobile. The experience layer was built in Kibana while the search layer was provided by Elastic Indexes, with document-level security via X-Pack.
Data ingestion was the biggest challenge—we needed to ingest data from a variety of sources and make it available to the user in near real-time. For this, we used Beats for logs, alongside Logstash for ingestion of business-related objects including advisor and client data.
Considering the security, we hosted the solution initially on-premises using Elastic Cloud Enterprise—a future-proof solution that enables easy upgrades. As part of the phased cloud migration, the overall solution getting migrated to Cloud using AWS EKS as a managed Kubernetes Service, AWS RDS as a fully-managed cloud database, and Elastic Cloud on AWS as a fully-managed service.
The platform was delivered on time and within budget. Since launch, the new search functionality has reduced search response times by 80 percent across the platform—a significant improvement in usability.
The business has also enrolled more than 20,000 advisors on to the platform, with 90 percent of advisors rating search as their favored functionality to access other capabilities.
Ankur Kumar
Senior Director Technology
