Through a business intelligence (BI) initiative that involved implementation of the Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, Raymond James has empowered both financial advisors and senior management with timely data delivered through easy-to-use scorecards.

“The financial advisors were really the drivers behind our BI initiative,” said Ed Ferrer, application development supervisor, data warehouse and BI for Raymond James.  “Our number of financial advisors is increasing everyday and the majority of them work remotely. We needed a tool that could provide them with valuable data about their customer base.”

The company’s three subsidiaries, Raymond James & Associates, Raymond James Financial Services, and Raymond James Ltd., collectively employ more than 4,800 financial advisors throughout the United States, Canada and internationally with total client assets under management exceeding $170 billion.

Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 allows different user groups within the company to collect data through different types of dashboards or scorecards that allow users to specify information based on their roles. For example, financial advisors can collect data that helps match investment products to various customer segments in an effort to enhance cross-selling. Advisors can monitor their own performance against goals and better track customers’ investment goals, trading activity and profitability.

Meanwhile, Raymond James can also measure company performance against strategic goals. Senior management can measure individual advisor performance by benchmarking them against company averages for a more accurate calculation of commissions. Branch managers can track their branch and individual advisor performance against their own set of KPIs such as total commissions, assets under management, customer profitability, account growth and number of accounts opened or closed.

Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 integrated well with the company’s existing environment, which included several legacy applications as well as the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 data management platform. Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 also leverages the SQL Server Business Intelligence platform’s data integration, analysis and reporting capabilities.

The organization currently stores a total of four terabytes of data, with plans to expand to ten terabytes. To better support the company’s growing business intelligence requirements, Raymond James plans to migrate to SQL Server 2005 to take advantage of its enhanced scalability and performance capabilities.