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Accelerate M&A with a Modern Information Management Platform

CASE STUDY

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Cetera Financial Group (“Cetera”) is the second-largest independent

financial advisor network in the United States by number of advisors,

and a leading provider of retail services to the investment programs of

banks and credit unions.

Through its network of independent firms, Cetera empowers the

delivery of professional financial advice to individuals, families, and

company retirement plans across the country.

Cetera offers its independent and institutions-based advisors the

benefits of a large, established broker-dealer through advisor support

resources such as award-winning wealth management and advisory

platforms, practice management support, and innovative technology.

Accelerated the process of

consolidating data and creating

a master product list from

3 to 5 days to 1 day

Improved data quality from 84%

to 92% to more accurately map

commissions to advisors’ assets

under management

Reduced the number of client

address duplicates to save costs

in mass mailings

Improved new data onboarding

from 1 day to 10 minutes

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

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The Complexity of Data and Operations at CeteraData management for Cetera’s Enterprise Data Hub (EDH) was a highly complex process,

given numerous acquisitions and the massive amount of incoming data from multiple data

sources, including Oracle, SQL Servers, Informix, and public sources such as MorningStar.

Prior to Paxata, updating Cetera’s EDH to consolidate data after a merger involved a

convoluted, two-step process.

The first step entailed Cetera’s IT group taking asset data from various data sources

collected through acquisitions and mapping them into Cetera’s central asset classification

system on a single Excel spreadsheet. Because the asset data came from a wide, disparate

group of sources, asset classification was complicated and time-consuming.

The second step was to share the Excel spreadsheet with Cetera’s team of subject matter

experts (SMEs) and have SMEs verify, validate, and edit their respective classifications on

the spreadsheet. The SMEs would then send a copy of the spreadsheet back to the IT

group, who would be responsible for updating the master Excel copy and reconciling any

differences while dealing with version control, different formatting, and other problematic

issues.

This highly-manual process of validating and updating would be repeated as different

SMEs then classified an asset as a mutual fund versus a variable annuity. Once agreement

was reached, IT would change the DDL in Informatica, test, and verify the results. For any

small update, this involved a 3 to 5 day effort.

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In order to support its growing network of 9,100+ financial advisors, with a

comprehensive EDH where they could accurately and quickly manage their book

of business and access up-to-date information on product, assets, and clients, IT

needed to act quickly and look for a solution that eliminated the laborious, time-

consuming, and manual iterations between SMEs and the lines of business.

To do so, Cetera started looking for new information management technologies

that offered:

As such, Cetera initiated a proof-of-value (POV) project to evaluate Paxata’s

Adaptive Information Platform and Self-Service Data Prep Application.

Low or no coding requirements

Data profiling and integration capabilities to link different systems

Process repeatability to

extend to additional broker-

dealers and new acquisitions

Ad-hoc data profiling for

one-off requests

Data validation against 3rd

party sources

Built-in governance for

compliance reasons

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Searching for a Solution to Empower 9100+ Financial Advisors

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Proof-of-Value and Why Paxata

A key objective of the POV project was to find a self-service data preparation

platform that would enable Cetera’s business and data teams to spend more

of their time analyzing information assets to solve problems and uncover new

business opportunities, rather than spending it preparing data for analytics.

The POV centered on three use cases:

+ GDC (Gross Dealer Concession) and Assets Mapping: This involved linking

bonus commissions to SmartWorks (Cetera’s CRM system for advisors to

manage their book of business, access accounts, place trades, retrieve client

notes, and review performance reports) and generating a report on GDC

and Assets Under Management at an account/client level. Objectives were

to increase the data-matching accuracy, reduce the processing time, and

publish the results to a table in the EDH for use in future requests.

+ Mass Client Mailing: This involved reconciling contacts across 10 broker

dealers for a mass mailing to clients, profiling the data, and resolving any

data quality issues. Objectives were to reduce the complexity of the existing

process, scale the solution to support more broker dealers, and make the

data and process reusable for future mailings.

+ Compliance Auditing: This involved linking transactions between the

Mutual Fund and Automated Customer Account Transfer (ACAT) systems,

determining the remaining shares, and identifying which accounts

transferred or closed. Objectives were to reduce the processing time

of bringing new data sources together and evaluate how to capture the

business rules within the data.

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The ResultsThe results achieved by using Paxata included:

+ GDC and Assets Mapping

• Reduced the processing time from 1 week to 3 hours

• Increased the data-matching accuracy/confidence rating from 84% to 92%

• Created a master system of record

• Introduced a repeatable process, with every update taking only 10 minutes

instead of 1 week with the prior set up

• Enabled faster turn-around for ad-hoc requests

+ Mass Client Mailing

• Processing time was reduced from 1 month to 1 day

• Data profiling and profiling against third party sources detected duplicate

addresses which were previously unidentified

• Business rules/logic were captured for reuse

• Created a master system of record

• Reduced the total cost to the mailing program

+ Compliance Auditing

• Quickly linked together different data sources

• Aggregation allowed comparing data at the right level (e.g. account) to identify

compliance gaps

• Data quality rules identified errors in classification codes

• Extracted and standardized values in a repeatable manner

• Iterative approach allowed for significantly reduced development times

As a result of its highly successful POV, Cetera selected Paxata as its self-service

data preparation software provider.

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The most impactful part

of using Paxata is the

tremendous time savings

we’ve experienced. The ability

to look at millions of rows and

to profile that data in multiple

ways quickly and easily

– we weren’t able to do

that before.”

–NANDA ALAGESAN, DATA ANALYST,

CETERA FINANCIAL GROUP

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With PaxataPaxata delivered measurable business value and ROI for Cetera by reducing the

time required for classifying and preparing source data from 3 to 5 days to 1 day.

Paxata created a master system of record for the product/asset data for each

broker’s book of business. The data transformation logic is recorded in Paxata

and any new data quickly flows through the logic and updates the EDH with a

refresh time of 10 minutes. These updates in the past took as long as 1 week.

The manual and slow exchange between IT and SMEs using Excel is now a lot

faster. Previously, even making small changes to the EDH, such as adding a

column, took as long as 5 days to accomplish. Today with Paxata, making a small

change to the EDH can be done in as little as an hour.

Faster time-to-value positively impacted savings in marketing promotions and

mass mailings. The previous, manual process involved taking data in different

formats from multiple spreadsheets and consolidating it into a single format for

mailing, an estimated 3½ days process. The same results can now be achieved in

just a few hours.

Accuracy has improved as well, with intelligence and machine learning techniques

that Paxata uses underneath the covers. For example, the join confidence in

mapping asset information from various systems has increased from 84% to

92%. This directly impacts commission payouts.

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We are able to make

informed, data-driven

decisions much more quickly

today by using Paxata. What

used to take us 3 to 5 days to

get data into a format suitable

for decision-making, now

takes us as little as an hour.”

– MICHELLE RIGGS,

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY TEAM LEAD,

CETERA FINANCIAL GROUP FINANCIAL GROUP

Cetera’s Use of Paxata

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Companies around the globe rely on Paxata to get smart about information. Paxata is

the pioneer that intelligently empowers all business consumers to transform raw data

into ready information, instantly and automatically, with an enterprise-grade, self-service

data preparation application and machine learning platform. Our Adaptive Information

Platform weaves data into an information fabric from any source and any cloud to create

trusted insights. Business consumers use clicks, not code to achieve results in minutes,

not months. With Paxata, Be an Information Inspired Business.

Paxata is headquartered in Redwood City, California with offices in New York, Ohio,

Washington D.C., and Singapore.

Paxata Headquarters 305 Walnut Street Redwood City, CA 94063 1-855-9-PAXATA paxata.com

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