AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Wealth Management Giant built a Data Foundation Platform for Intraday Reporting with Unqork’s Codeless Platform on AWS
By Chintan Sanghavi, Sr. Partner Solution Architect – AWS
By Vivian Lai, Capital Market Specialist – AWS
By Ian Erad, Product Strategy – Unqork
In the face of ever-stricter regulatory rules, rising client expectations for timely insights, and downward pressure on margins, wealth management firms are searching for ways to make their complex data management and reporting infrastructures less costly and more performant, reliable, and accurate—and able to support intraday reporting to better serve both internal stakeholders and clients.
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| Unqork |
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With the help of AWS and Unqork, one of the world’s largest wealth management firms modernized its data foundation platform to:
- Reconcile and standardize data across 150M client records daily
- Improve timeliness and accuracy of reporting for internal teams, advisors, and clients
- Reduce data-related operational expenses
- Pave the way for intraday reporting
CHALLENGES
Many wealth management firms find themselves devoting significant technical expertise to data-related backend processes that are siloed across teams and require significant manual intervention. And yet they still struggle to deliver timely and reliable reporting, visibility, and insights that both clients and advisors increasingly expect. In order to build an accurate, cost-effective, and performant data foundation platform, firms face a number of challenges, including:
- Disparate data sources & systems without a single source of truth: Multiple legacy source systems lead to data quality issues, duplicative processes, inability to access data for insights and reporting, and a reliance on skilled technical talent to solve those problems.
- Siloed processes & teams with high operational overhead: Siloed systems lead to fragmentation of both processes and teams, requiring higher operational overhead and manual processes to regularly stitch together data and workflows.
- Long, costly, & rigid data transformation projects: Traditionally, digital transformation projects have not only been slow and expensive but also delivered disappointing results. They result in solutions that are rigid, slow, and expensive to change, and fail to evolve with new data sources, technologies, and business requirements.
SELECTING AWS & UNQORK
In early 2023, the firm invited AWS and Unqork, along with Snowflake, and Informatica, to a 3-day workshop with the goal of building a high-level prototype of a new data foundation platform. The firm could immediately see the value of AWS services and data management tools to serve as the foundation for data ingestion, standardization, governance, storage, and for the creation of APIs. The firm could also see that Unqork’s codeless platform would play a key role in building a data platform on AWS. They could leverage the Unqork platform to provide:
- A UI/UX layer that powers an operations management portal to:
- Enable technical users across teams to efficiently manage work
- Equip managers with dashboard views for better decision-making
- An orchestration layer to manage API calls to downstream systems pulling together disparate data sources and systems.
Unqork’s codeless development platform made this possible thanks to:
- Rapid application development that is 100%-visual, requiring no code to write or manage applications
- Powerful exception management and workflow capabilities
- Extreme flexibility, with the ability to update applications more quickly and easily than traditional technologies.
THE DECIDING FACTOR: SPEED AND AGILITY OF AWS + UNQORK
By the end of the 3-day workshop, the Unqork team had created 6 use cases that hooked into live APIs and could run analytics, KPIs, and metrics to track data quality. The firm’s expectations were exceeded, and work on the solution began 6 weeks later. The firm was especially impressed by the way Unqork’s 100% visual platform enabled business and IT teams to work shoulder-to-shoulder to build out a value-driven minimum viable product (MVP) at speed.
The firm knew that data sources, workflows, business requirements, and other processes would inevitably evolve. As a result, they were not just focused on building a solution quickly to meet their current goals. They wanted a tech stack that would provide the flexibility, agility, and robustness to scale the solution and support other use cases. And AWS + Unqork showed that, together, they could deliver on that vision.
THE DATA FOUNDATION PLATFORM SOLUTION
The firm needed to build a data foundation platform that would take huge volumes of data from sources like market data vendors, internal trading systems, alternate data sources, etc., and deliver it in a timely, accurate, and standardized way to the advisors and customer-facing reporting systems. The solution enables ingestion of data in multiple ways such as flat files, messages, and API calls with hundreds of data attributes. The solution ensures that the data is standardized to the firm’s data model and that each transaction is pinned to the correct client portfolio, account, and associated advisor.
The firm partnered with AWS and Unqork, along with Snowflake and Informatica, to build a fast, highly efficient data foundation platform. The solution provides a single source of truth across disparate systems, powers operational efficiency, and delivers data for insights and reporting for operations teams, with plans to expand to advisors and clients in the near future. The solution includes:
- A flexible data ingestion layer
- A modern and scalable master data management solution and a data warehouse with revamped model
- A data consumption layer for effective and timely data delivery
- An app layer for orchestrating data movement and exceptions management
- UIs for technical users to summarize rules, SLAs, status, and ongoing analytics
Figure 1 Data Platform Architecture Overview
Data Ingestion: Using Amazon API Gateway, Amazon S3, AWS Glue, and Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, the firm created fast and flexible data ingestion layer. As a result, it now takes just 3 hours to process a month’s worth of transactions (239 gigabytes of data), instead of several days. The data ingestion layer ingested data in both MDM layer and a data warehousing layer. At the same time, an application built in Unqork allows admin users to configure data sources, track and visualizes ingested metrics such as ingestion times, provide errors management, and other operational information from AWS systems. In addition to faster, more accurate ingestion, the firm can now:
- Identify source changes and quickly modify and deploy codeless configurations
- Enforce best practices and business standards
- Expand framework reuse and scale to meet evolving business needs
Master Data Management (MDM): To make all that data usable and unlock its business value, the data foundation solution leverages Informatica for master data management. An application layer built in Unqork enables teams to manage the rules, manage exceptions, and maintain data quality. The benefits include:
- A single source of truth for all downstream systems
- Data governance to support more accurate reporting and transparency
- The ability to track data lineage with greater precision
Data warehousing (DW): The solution draws on the power of Amazon Glue, Amazon S3, Snowflake’s data warehouse solution, and Unqork to:
- Store large amounts of data in an efficient and scalable way
- Standardize the data model for efficient data consumption
- Shrink workload processing times from hours to minutes, ensuring the previous day’s information is published and available before markets open
- Improve advisor experiences with faster reloading of data
An application built using Unqork allows management of processes and exceptions, view data, and lineage.
Reporting & Data Consumption: The firm now has a foundation to deliver the data necessary for dynamic visibility into trading activities at scale. Leveraging Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon QuickSight, the data consumption layer brings relevant data from the MDM, and Data Warehouse to its consumers such as trading applications, advisors and clients. Here, the data is prepped to power the firm’s trading reporting systems, as well as advisor and client experiences. An Unqork application layer provides an operations management portal that makes it easy to view and manage API rules, manage access, and deliver insights to end users faster and with greater accuracy. Benefits include:
- Support for near real-time business reporting with dynamic aggregation of data
- Up-to-date historical reporting
- Real-time analysis to support intraday results
- Ability to drill down from summary data to highly granular details
SUMMARY – A foundation for innovation
By leveraging the power and scalability of AWS along with Unqork’s codeless development platform, the firm was able to build highly scalable, transparent, event driven, and flexible data platform. By doing so, the firm will be able to deliver near real-time reporting, support more timely and powerful insights to advisor and client experiences, and power all new initiatives thanks to significant gains in operational efficiencies. The firm is even considering using the data platform as a foundation for artificial intelligence (AI) and new revenue-generating data-as-a-service offerings, in addition to exploring ways to leverage their new capabilities across multiple business units.
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Unqork – AWS Partner Spotlight
Unqork is an AWS Advanced Technology Partner and AWS Financial Services Competency Partner. Unqork’s Codeless as a Service (CaaS) platform helps leading organizations build, deploy and manage complex software without having to think about code. Unqork created the codeless architecture standard – the future of software development that frees the world’s largest enterprises from the pitfalls of legacy code and allows them to focus on innovation to drive business and maintain a competitive edge. More than one third of Unqork’s corporate customers are in the Fortune 500 and in last year alone, hundreds of organizations used Unqork to avoid 2.4 million coding hours and redeploy resources to higher-value activities, resulting in savings of nearly $1 billion.
Armed with Unqork, organizations can achieve a secure, future-proof codeless architecture for applications that provide usability, extensibility, upgradability, portability, reliability, predictability and more across a variety of use case from new business modernization in Insurance to onboarding and servicing in Financial Services and Case Management in government agencies.