Case Study

Orion Saves Thousands of Manual Hours and Reinforces the “Holy Grail of Advisor-Client Relationships”

"We knew the first step was finding a partner who understands our complex business and needs, while also being on the same page with our process roadmap before we started talking about automation. As we examined effort-intensive process areas, we realized that the entire landscape of employee driven operations from trade notifications to corporate actions had to change."

Randy Lambert, Chief Operations Officer, Orion

Accelerating critical back-office operations with automation

Financial Services leaders like Orion exemplify the need for a cultural shift wherein automation solutions are introduced to handle cumbersome, iterative processes with minimal supervision and remarkable efficiency. Often, this means leaving behind process structures that have been in place for several decades and looking forward to a more efficient and rewarding way of doing things.JIFFY.ai helped Orion discover and realize efficiencies in their business optimization roadmaps through intelligent automation, all while building lasting internal capabilities and delivering measurable outcomes for them.

Challenge

Meet our customer

Orion Advisor Solutions is a premier financial services and solutions provider based in the US. Their solutions transform the advisor-client relationship by enabling growth-focused advisory firms to strengthen their client relationships, gain a competitive edge in a crowded marketplace, and build strong, profitable businesses. Orion supports more than 2,200 advisory firms with $1.4 trillion in assets under administration and an additional $48 billion of combined platform assets. Their flagship Orion Connect portal serves clients across banking, financial planning, operations management, compliance management, and investment domains.

Leading a cultural shift in customer engagement

As a technology solutions leader that offers investment management and turnkey asset management services, as well as advisory technology solutions to clients, there were four vital drivers behind Orion’s desire to begin implementing automation:

Scale business processes

Orion relied on complex back-end processes involving thousands of mouse clicks where automation was essential to provide time back in their team’s day. Orion’s goal was to reduce the number of manual mundane tasks and to increase revenue per operations FTE.

Bring about cultural transformation

Orion had a strong focus on enhancing their organizational culture to prioritize simplicity and their employees’ valuable time and work-life balance, without compromising business performance. Automation was a crucial step in this journey.

Decrease operational errors

Manual processes were often prone to errors arising from task volumes, fatigue, and the repetitive nature of certain activities. Orion wanted to incorporate process automation to effectively improve their service speed and accuracy.

Improve client experience

Smarter, faster, and more accurate processes would translate into a better front-end experience for clients on their Orion Connect portal. The company sought a higher client Net Promoter Score (NPS) through the implementation of automation.

Liberating staff from mundane tasks to focus on high-value work

As we embarked on our partnership with Orion, our objectives were clear: simplify and automate mundane business processes and de-risk them to provide Orion’s staff more time to devote towards building client relationships and strategizing innovations for the advisory community, while also improving the experience for all the constituents across the value chain. To that end, the four key processes to be automated were:

New account creation from custodian data

Whenever new accounts were created on the Orion Connect portal, information from custodians like Pershing and Schwab had to be laboriously cleaned and converted. Because this was done manually, Orion’s employees had to be available outside of standard work hours (often as early as 4 a.m.) to wait for the data feed from custodians.

Redemption request processing alongside a legacy enterprise content management (ECM) engine

For processing redemption requests, Orion’s clients utilized the Orion Connect portal as the frontend user interface. Redemption requests from third-party relationships were received through Orion’s existing back-end ECM engine, which then required a high level of analyzation from associates to extract metadata before passing them on to Orion Connect.

Monthly statement curation and uploads

At the end of each month, various custodians would generate a catalog of information, which would then be collated and curated by Orion’s employees to present a comprehensive statement for their clients. The process of ingesting data from the custodians, creating statements, and uploading them to Orion Connect was effort-intensive, and claimed most of employees’ time during the first week of every month. This affected other higher-value tasks, causing the projects to suffer.

Trade notifications to reflect adjustments to holdings

With large trade model rebalances, allocations had to be updated and shared with the traders in a timely manner as per regulations. As a result of this being completed manually, Orion’s employees were alerted of readjustments on very short notice and would have to interrupt their ongoing tasks to update the sheets and send out proper notifications.

Solution

Achieving key milestones in intelligent enterprise automation

JIFFY.ai’s intelligent automation solution addressed these four major business use cases ~~for Orion as listed below:~~

Eliminated the need for manual intervention in new account creation from custodian data. The solution ensures 24/7 availability without stretching resources.
Transformed the monthly statement curation process. The solution extracts data from custodian sources, creates statements, and uploads them in a presentable format to the client accounts, thus reducing the volume of month-end efforts for Orion’s employees, and improving their client experiences significantly.

Automated the transfer of redemption request metadata between Orion Connect and the ECM, keeping that channel intact. This ensures that repetitive, rules-based steps are performed automatically, while keeping a ‘human in the loop’ for approving exceptions.
When a request is submitted to update model allocations, the automated solution now pulls trade data and creates a list for the Traders to be notified. It then updates the allocation information and sends out the appropriate trade notifications in real time.

Results

Key Outcomes

In the first quarter of implementation, Orion achieved the following results:

Two automation processes in production, saving 2,000 person-hours of effort annually.

One automation process undergoing user acceptance testing, saving 390 person-hours of effort annually.

In ongoing efforts, Orion is actively making progress with the following:

Three automation processes in development with potential savings of 5,000 person-hours annually.

The Way Forward

JIFFY.ai will continue to partner with Orion to automate more of their business processes and explore areas of synergy in other enterprise functions such as Finance, HR, and Compliance.

Orion Saves Thousands of Manual Hours and Reinforces ‘Holy Grail of the Advisor-Client Relationship'

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Key metrics

100%

Automated error-free customer data porting, statement, curation and notifications.

5000+

Person hours of
manual effort
saved.

45 mins-120 secs

Time to generate notifications reduced.

$180,000

Savings in
resource
expenditure.

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