Personalized Advisory Reports
Summary:
A new client-outreach initiative requires a means to generate personalized retirement reports based on detailed customer interviews. The reports must be available in real time to support the advisory session and also queued for next-day print and delivery.
The Opportunity:
One of the largest financial services firms in the world set about fielding a best-in-class retirement planning and advice tools for use by its financial advisors. Toward this end, they developed an application that leads consulting financial advisors with a client data collection process through which they gather detailed account information, contribution plans, and retirement goals. This data is then passed through an Ibbotson analysis engine to produce personalized retirement advice in raw form. At the end of the interview, a client-presentable report should immediately be available to the consultant and also orderable for next-day delivery in hard copy form. Critically, due to the nature of the data, all aspects of the process need to be handled with rigorous concern for security.
The Solution:
Synthesis provides key back-end functions and integration points for this process. Data is handed off to our solution through a series of double-encrypted custom web service calls. The rules-driven composition engine produces a highly customized document reflecting all the gathered information, custom messaging, disclosures, statistics and the Ibbotson-derived investment advice. A proof draft of the document is provided back to the originating application in real-time. The content automation then delivers a print-ready high-resolution version of the report, also double-encrypted, to Merrill Communications, a financial print and fulfillment partner. A print order is queued and the report is printed and mailed within 24 hours.
Throughout the entire process, it never stores any unencrypted personal data to disk or database. Data is retained in system memory only until handoffs have been validated.
All system components are designed with complete redundancy and no significant downtime has been experienced in over six years of production operations.
Results:
Personalized retirement advice and planning reports of 20-30 pages in length, containing highly stylized charts and graphs and custom content, are composed and remitted to the advice application in under 60 seconds.
Reports look as if they were hand-crafted by desktop publishers even while the system was producing over 5000 custom reports per month.
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