BT, Microsoft Partnership Helps Brokerage Firms Get Closer to their Clients

In this period of financial disarray and retrenchment, capital markets firms are focusing on three key areas: cutting costs, better risk management and concentrating on their client businesses to generate fees, says Ian Warford, Microsoft’s director of securities and capital markets in EMEA.

And it is in that crucial client service area that Warford says Microsoft’s Institutional Client Platform (ICP) proposition is generating a lot of interest: “Fundamentally it’s about enabling large brokerage firms to generate additional fees from their customer base, to improve their customer experience, and to collaborate with their customer,” he says.

To this end, Microsoft has been partnering with BT on the ICP to enrich the way capital markets firms are able to interact with and support their clients.

As Apu Mitra, director of unified communications and collaboration for capital markets with BT Global Financial Services, points out, his organization is a dominant player in the voice communications space with its trader turrets, while Microsoft’s strength is in developing applications and owning the desktop. So by working together, they are able to link the voice functionality offered by BT with Microsoft’s data-rich applications to provide traders with more client-relevant information that they can use to improve the customer experience.

The ICP vision, therefore, breaks down into four main components. The first is to have a single platform for both low touch and high touch trading, so that a brokerage firm’s clients and its internal staff have the same trading experience.

Another component creates a holistic view of a client’s activity, notes Mitra. So for example, by leveraging Microsoft Dynamics CRM to get a single view of the customer across product silos and functional areas, and using the capabilities in SharePoint and what was PerformancePoint to drill into customer information, salespeople can see topics of potential interest they can raise with active or dormant clients during any incoming or outbound call, and also help foster cross-product selling.

A third area deals with integration, so pulling a user firm’s various legacy systems together to provide the salesperson with a composite application they can use without having to re-key information from multiple systems, explains Warford.

And then the other ICP component focuses on collaboration, both internally between employees and externally with customers. “If I’m a salesperson, I may want to collaborate immediately with the research folks while I have my customer on the phone to offer them some new trade ideas or analytics,” notes Warford. “And I may want to collaborate with the trader while I have the customer on the phone to execute a trade.”

To achieve the voice and data linkage BT is using its Myriad iBridge middleware to connect its telephony trading capabilities to Microsoft’s applications.

“We’ve provided a hook inside Microsoft Office Communicator,” explains Jappy Takhar, head of innovation and emerging technologies with BT Global Financial Services. “And then that talks to Microsoft Dynamics, which is getting more of a footprint in the capital markets area.”

As a result, staff on the trading floor can, for example, command the system to make a call to a counterparty, set up conference calls, intercom people or connect certain lines together and put them on speaker, says Takhar. Similarly, if a trader missed any calls while speaking to other customers “Dynamics can quickly tell me of those missed calls so I can dial them back. So there are huge productivity benefits there.”

Meanwhile, if a trader receives an inbound call from a customer they can instruct the system to “get my data out of my CRM system, and also any underlying market data related to that customer, as the call is ringing,” says Takhar. “That saves time, as I’ve immediately got the data related to the customer when I answer that call.” So the enhanced business processes can speed up the transactions that happen in a day, he notes.

As for future steps for the Institutional Client Platform, the focus is on “cloud computing and the Software-plus-Services model,” says Warford, to offer both big and smaller banks quicker time-to-market and reduce the cost of ownership. “The idea of
Software-plus-Services is interesting because with some of the larger banks, which have a lot of infrastructure already, we can augment that as opposed to ripping it all out. Software-plus-Services means some parts run in the cloud, some run at their own premises. We can combine it together and provide better value to the customer.”

Microsoft already has various applications in a cloud environment, notes Warford, such as Windows Live, Microsoft Dynamics, SharePoint and SQL Server. “So, working with BT and our other partners such as IM Group and Lab49, we’ll be using those as components to build our customer experience in the cloud.”

www.globalservices.bt.com