State Street Adopts AWD to Create Global Trade Processing Center of Excellence
"With increased trade volumes and new federal mandates, we needed to enhance our workflow system. DST helped address our needs."
F. Scott Longo, Vice President, Global Transaction Processing, State Street
New and Ongoing Demands
In the trade processing industry, success typically means meeting and exceeding daily volume standards, quality expectations and deadlines. At State Street, that was just the beginning. With increased volumes due to continued business demand, the financial services leader also had to split its operations. This would allow trade settlement and cash processing functions to resume immediately at an alternate location in the event of a major business disruption. State Street's selection of DST's AWD solution provided a comprehensive resolution for all of these issues, affording State Street the following:
- A world-class BPM platform that offered scalability and business prioritization
- A business tool that put control in State Street's hands
Higher Expectations
State Street's first-generation workflow system needed the ability to prioritize, which would help handle increased trade instructions. The previous system was a labor-intensive, multi-application process, which created challenges when volumes increased. As a result, State Street began searching for a provider to enhance its first-generation system, while meeting the following objectives:
- Ability to scale across numerous geographic locations
- Elimination of system desktop deployment requirements
- Capacity to divide large faxes into individual transactions for simultaneous processing; each transaction needed to be routed to the next pre-defined logical step and then be presented to a trade processor skilled in handling that particular transaction
- Ability to match work to the correct employee, based on skill set categorization
- Elimination of core data retyping in downstream applications
- Ability to provide management with insight into the processing queue, as well as a transparent process view for customers
Support for State Street's Vision
To effectively speak to the organization's needs, DST engaged associates from its AWD Development, User Experience and Consulting teams to support State Street's vision. AWD's solution needed to deliver work to the most qualified State Street associate in the priority directed by their business needs. After reviewing RFP responses and presentations from their incumbent vendor and a host of other software, workflow and information management contenders, State Street management chose DST Technologies' AWD solution.
"Listening to State Street's immediate tactical concerns and their goals for a permanent global fix, we developed an AWD application for mission-critical operations that would bring their people, processes and system together to form a scalable, operational center of excellence."
John Vaughn, Vice President, DST Technologies
A Rapid Implementation and Return on Investment
Once selected to provide services, DST and State Street cooperated to take the proposal from concept to reality:
- Joint Application Design (JAD) sessions - Knowledge workshops collected business requirements to determine work scope
- Defined functional specifications - Applying DST's platform-independent technology and Service Modeling Language (SML) data constructs via service-oriented architecture to determine how to best integrate AWD into State Street's operations
- Development - An inclusive approach created a custom plan to meet defined business objectives, based on open dialogue
- Quality assurance testing
- Multi-location deployment
From start to finish, AWD was successfully implemented at all pertinent State Street locations within 18 months. DST Professional Services and AWD Support Center teams trained State Street employees so they were ready to hit the ground running.
The AWD solution was able to immediately demonstrate value to State Street's employees and executives by allowing work to move to multiple geographic locations in the US, Canada and India. This enhanced the company's operational risk management, which was also aided by the introduction of internal technologies including dashboards to monitor performance and measure specific results against expectations - Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Most importantly, work was now being directed to the right employee at the right time based on skill sets and other factors determined by State Street. In short, DST's software and services provided a new level of automation, sophistication, control and visibility. Additional impact included the following:
- 28% more trades processed, with the same number of employees
- New levels of scalability: 4x users
- Deployment of a second business application, based on the overall success of the first
The same potent combination of DST's world-class technology coupled with industry-leading experience can be applicable to solve similar industry problems, to aid in responding to fluid regulatory requirements and to take advantage of emerging business opportunities. The ability to integrate real business process improvement with expertise around the technology can help the industry fundamentally change how it does business.
State Street is now empowered to do more, with the same people, globally.
"The solution worked exactly as promised and helped us create a true Global Trade Processing Center of Excellence."
F. Scott Longo, Vice President, Global Transaction Processing, State Street