When a top 10 independent broker-dealer wanted to create
a digital simulation of an existing application to avoid
exposing customer data, it engaged CapTech to build and
deploy the model. Once in place, the digital simulation
allowed the company to share its systems with prospective
financial advisors, as well as train existing financial advisors,
all without risking any impact to customer data.
Challenge
With over a trillion dollars in assets under management, this
top 10 independent broker-dealer commands a vast amount
of customer data. Each customer transaction, from account
openings, to buying and selling investments, must be
handled accurately and efficiently. The company’s system for
handling these transactions is complex, and it struggled to
train new advisors to use the system without any exposure
risk for customer accounts.
To accomplish this, and to be able to preview the system in
recruiting efforts, the company engaged CapTech to create a
digital simulation, or digital twin, of its on-premises systems
that would not contain any sensitive customer data and
would allow advisors to perform account functions without
impacting any actual customer accounts.
Approach
The client’s team had executed a full proof-of-concept prior
to engaging CapTech, and knew they wanted to leverage a
fully cloud-native platform for the simulation. The CapTech
team began work by re-creating the existing application in
the cloud. The cloud-based environment gave CapTech the
opportunity to leverage coding best practices and look for
better solutions to replace some of the older processes
employed by the on-premises systems.
Once the new application had been built, Personally Identifiable Information (PII) was masked or anonymized. Amazon Open Search used to surface the masked account and investment data. AWS Lambda was used to develop the API stack.
Results
The digital simulation launched in May 2022 and was extremely successful, with a 56% engagement rate among the client’s advisors. Additionally, most users signed in more than once, indicating that they found it useful enough to log in a second time. From a user standpoint, the simulation was indistinguishable from the original application. Users were able to fully experience the system’s functionality without any concern of exposing or impacting actual account data.
The simulation also served to familiarize the client with a cloud-based system. The client was able to see exactly how the application would function on a cloud-based platform before making a full commitment to migration.
