Case Study Financial Services

Case Study

A major US brokerage company offers a B2B product which allows investment professionals and registered investment advisors to manage their businesses. It offers the ability to trade equities and mutual funds, review order status, access their clients accounts balance information and investment holdings. In their application each module must be accessed through a specific workflow and each workflow requires specific forms. Each form requires specific knowledge of the user to operate on it. A lot of functionality reaches across modules and must be implemented separately. This approach creates a dilemma as the complexity of the application grows. Because every new module or functionality potentially creates many more forms and screens. The users are not able to use them because they stay in their familiar workflow and might only sporadically invest the time to explore other features. Furthermore the semantics across forms is not consistent which leads to the problem that critical information is not found.

To harness the power of integrating all the new features which are constantly added to the system the company is looking for an SQBA (SearchQuery Based Applications) approach. SBSGRID is able to solve this problem by providing one generic user interface which is able to dynamically adapt to the needs of the user. The user is entering questions in free form and this way approximates the specific information he is looking for. Since SBSGRID is semantically and contextually aware at each step of the workflow all the necessary steps to assist the user can be conducted automatically. This solves the dilemma described above. Moreover it creates new business opportunities because now the user is able to ask questions across domains and modules (new insights).

The most critical and demanding aspect in this scenario is the need for operators, conditions and embedded analytics which have to work on the fly. Certain keywords which are used by natural language are automatically translated into calculations, complex joins or analytics behind the scenes. Classic semantic search solutions failed in this scenario because they operate on a concept level (and not data level) and are focused to optimize and improve search. However SBSGRID executes queries (much like a database query) and therefore is a fit for these scenarios.