St. James’s Place Wealth Management was founded in 1991 and is now a FTSE 100 company, with over £143.1 billion of client funds under management. The company specializes in delivering face-to-face, personalized wealth management advice and services through the Partnership, its own group of more than 4,000 qualified advisers. St. James’s Place operates predominantly out of the UK, but also has a presence in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai.
Data Virtualization at St. James’s Place
On a daily basis, St. James’s Place needs to adhere to myriad new regulations. The latest was the European legislative framework called MiFID II, aimed at regulating financial markets, increasing cost transparency, improving the record-keeping of transactions, and strengthening data protection for investors. To comply with MiFID II, St. James’s Place needed to provide an itemized breakdown of all costs and charges to increase transparency and inform investors on how their money was invested. Additionally, the overall transient regulatory environment pushed the company towards building flexibility into its data infrastructure, to move away from rigid extract, transform, and load (ETL)-based data integration approaches towards a more agile, flexible, and adaptable data-virtualization-based data integration environment.
St. James’s Place implemented the Denodo Platform as a virtual data integration layer to logically integrate all of the company’s required data for reporting. This annual customer report is the biggest mailing that St. James’s Place performs, and all of the data for it comes through the Denodo Platform. St. James’s Place also leverages the Denodo Platform to create RESTful services that provide data, directly in XML format, straight to the company’s print engine to further share the data with clients and other stakeholders. With this new data infrastructure in palace, St. James’s Place has significantly decreased its data delivery times for generating reports and has increased its internal and external compliance with numerous regulations.