Company
A major Tier 1 investment bank had recognized early on the benefits of providing its staff with an integrated desktop. Its aim was to decompose the legacy applications it had into micro-applications that could be assembled into personalized desktops across the trading floors. It also wanted to enable interoperability between these micro-applications and other third-party applications to provide a seamless user experience.
Problem
After a promising start with a traditional Interop vendor, the project ran into problems due to the complexity of the different in-house applications involved. Multiple desks and teams required different set-ups and after 12 months IT were still struggling with the technology. User expectations were not being met even in areas such as basic integration between their in-house applications and Excel.
Vendor Evaluation
Rather than abandon the project, the bank approached Luxoft for assistance and started to look for replacement technology. Through experience gained with Glue42 in other financial institutions, the experts at Luxoft were quickly able to replicate the current environment and deliver the software assets that were previously promised and never delivered. These included configurable launchpads, multi-application workspaces and advanced data integration between legacy and new systems. Very soon, Luxoft delivered a roadmap of engagement that went considerably beyond what the bank had thought possible.
Solution
The bank has ambitious plans to unify the user experience across applications, asset classes, business units and banking divisions.
The first integrated workspaces are now live. These allow users to combine windows from their in-house order management system with their in-house CRM to retrieve an interactive view of axes, runs and analytics with client interest lists and client holdings. All data is seamlessly synchronized across these systems meaning that the traders have full contextualized data at their fingertips when they need it most.
Phase 1 also includes integration of 3rd party applications and multi-machine interoperability. Within days, a click-to-sync solution was configured between two machines, one running Bloomberg and the other the in-house applications.
Finally, the launchbar was configured to support their long-term goal of rolling out across different asset classes. Each business unit can now have a role/function-specific experience in which users only see the apps they require and are entitled to use.
Future Plans
Now that the business benefits of Desktop Integration have been proven, the bank plans to extend the integrations between in-house applications and other 3rd party applications such as Salesforce and use this approach across other asset classes such as Equities and FX. They will also make use of Glue42 Notifications and Insights (to help with the technology migration strategy).
