A Leading Wealth Management Firm

Building a Faster Contextual Search Experience

Providing faster, more relevant search results for wealth advisors.

A Leading Wealth Management Firm wanted to improve operational efficiency, reduce total cost of ownership and, perhaps most critically, improve the user experience for its advisors. For this, it needed a new platform with advanced search functionality to replace its existing monolith system.

The Imperative for Change

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 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.

The Transformative Solution

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 Business Impact

The platform was delivered on time and within budget. Since launch, the new search functionality has reduced search response times by 80% across the platform—a significant improvement in usability.

The business has also enrolled more than 20,000 advisors on to the platform, with 90% of advisors rating search as their favored functionality to access other capabilities.

20K+

advisors using the platform

80%

improvement in search response times

90%

of advisors use search to access various functional capabilities