Infusion Development Boosts Broker Insight with Microsoft Unified Communications

Take a significant financial services issue – the persistent need to analyze risk and to report to regulators – add a forward-thinking Microsoft technology partner, and the Microsoft Office unified communications platform. What do you get? A system that ties customer correspondence (email, phone calls, instant messages) into an investment broker's risk management system...while also providing a digital auditing trail to satisfy reporting regulations. This is the concept that Microsoft partner Infusion Development has devised. We interviewed Infusion Development Canada Director Bill Baldasti to learn the business drivers behind the solution, and the role Microsoft software plays in the platform.

Q: What's happening in the industry that caused Infusion to consider developing a compliance solution?

A: One thing we've seen is a number of financial institutions continue to deal with issues around compliance. Recently the larger Type 1 providers have started to focus on that and risk reporting – the different levels of support they need for auditing. Now we're starting to see the same type of regulatory compliance trickle down to the Type 2 providers, so independent brokers are much more interested in ensuring they're also compliant.

There's this whole notion of ensuring that individual investment managers have the customer's best interests at heart, from an auditing perspective. In the case of a regulatory audit or some kind of review, brokers need to be able to showcase that they have in fact been working in the best interests of the clients. Recording conversations, messages, including instant messages, regardless of the communication channel – being able to capture that information makes it a part of the reporting process. Ideally the information would also tie back to the customer's trades or the financial decisions they made, and the particular services that the broker made on behalf of that customer.

Q: It sounds like the solution would have a dual role – helping brokers comply with regulations, and helping them serve customers as well.

A: Exactly. Imagine you call into your broker and now, not only is your broker tracking for regulatory purposes, they also get an immediate profile of you, very much like an additional customer relationship management view. They could quickly look back and see when the last time you have a voice conversation with them, maybe review that conversation, or the email conversation, or the instant messages you exchanged. It could feed into their calculations of risk tolerance and how your investments are performing, and that influences the products and services they recommend.

Q: How far along is Infusion in the development of this solution?

A: It's a concept at this stage, but the individual pieces exist – they were just used for different purposes. We have a tremendous wealth of experience building custom capital- and trading-systems for capital markets, so we're intimately familiar with a lot of the problems that Wall Street and Bay Street are facing, and we also know the technologies these companies use. We're leveraging Microsoft's latest and greatest technologies for these solutions. What we saw as the logical next piece in the puzzle was an interface between the broker and the customer that would easily tie in with the trading system itself and the customer relationship management system, using unified communications technology.

Q: What role does the Microsoft Customer Care Framework (CCF) play in the solution?

A: CCF is the actual tool we use to bring all of the different components together. It allows us to unify the communications technology stack with the customer's existing applications, and host everything so it looks like a single client.

Q: It sounds like the flexibility of the Microsoft platform facilitates this solution.

A: Absolutely. We feel strongly that Microsoft is doing its part to provide enabling technologies so we don't need to focus nearly as much as we did five or six years ago on the plumbing. A lot of the components are just there now, so we can focus on driving the business and solving business problems.

Q: Would the CRM system that your new solution connects to have to be built on Microsoft technology as well?

A: No, although in the initial rollout we are working closely with the Microsoft Dynamics customer relationship management solution. Arguably this could be extended to any CRM system. That's the beauty of the CCF. It works really well with any underlying relational database management platform, and any underlying CRM system. We wouldn't want to rip and replace the customer's existing infrastructure if they're not using Microsoft CRM, and we can't assume that every customer is going to have all of the pieces in place for the auditing solution to tie into. We'll provide the pieces as customers need them, working with their existing information assets, right down to the trading system.

Q: When will the solution be commercially available?

A: We're working through pilots right now, in fact. One thing we do regularly is work very closely with our customers to really make sure the end solution reflects what they're looking for. It's due diligence on our part. We know the technologies, and we know how they apply to customers, but we don't sit at trading desks every day, and we're not full-time brokers. So it's important for us to get that feedback from our clients. Sometimes it comes as a shock to them – they just didn't realize that technology had come as far as this – but their feedback reflects what they really need and what's important to them.