Profiled:
London Stock Exchange
5 November 2007
In 2006, the London Stock Exchange (the Exchange) was the world's third- largest exchange; the value of shares traded on the Exchange totalled approximately £7.57 trillion, or nearly US$15 trillion—a 50 per cent jump from the prior year. Moving this amount of money involves constant, split- second decisions made by thousands of people.
The engine of this formidable financial market is information. Data is critical for the Exchange membership, which includes hundreds of banks and stockbrokers who trade for clients and on their own behalf. The relationship between the Exchange and its member firms is handled by the Exchange's primary account managers, or PAMs.
One of the key tasks for PAMs is to gather internal information on member firms' trading trends and patterns to obtain a better understanding of individual customers and the market as a whole. However, there was a problem with this.
"When our clients have questions, we want to respond to them with the best possible answers," says Nicola Lynch, head of client management for the Exchange. "But that involved us checking numerous databases and data sources to come up with the correct answers. Depending on the complexity of the question, the answer could take from a couple of hours to a couple of days to analyse and deliver."
To better serve the client firms and to maintain its rate of growth, the Exchange decided to look for a technology solution that could help the PAMS gather and analyse information more quickly. Working with Microsoft, the Exchange developed an Office business application (OBA) designed to streamline how PAMs access the wealth of information that is compiled every day in the Exchange's data warehouses.
The central element of the solution is called the PAM Dashboard. A Web- based intranet solution that relies on a number of Microsoft technologies, the dashboard is linked to a central data warehouse. From there, the information stored in the warehouse is turned into online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes; the information in the cubes is updated every three minutes. The data cubes are then delivered to the PAM Dashboard.
The dashboard uses a technology called Excel Services in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which makes it possible for users to display and work with Office Excel workbooks within Office SharePoint Server 2007. "With Excel Services, our PAMs can create specific, customised views of information by client, which helps them to see the client's level of business interaction with the Exchange," says Robin Paine, chief technology officer for the Exchange. "Because of Excel Services, these views can be distributed effectively and efficiently across the whole of our primary account manager community"
Since the earliest stages of the PAM Dashboard deployment, the Exchange's executives and PAMs noted a dramatic improvement in how the account managers were able to use their time.
Edward Fisher, a senior PAM who is responsible for managing a number of high-profile Exchange member firms, says: "What the PAM Dashboard gives us is the means to spend our time more efficiently when analysing data and presenting the results to our clients."