The subsidiary of a leading investment bank called on Iteamic to develop an application that would support its value-added research in the areas of investment banking, institutional brokerage, and equity research. U.S. and international growth companies and institutional investors rely on the bank’s research for real-time updates to help them formulate their investment strategies. The investment bank established Iteamic as its technology and application development partner to extend its internal staff.

Business Challenge
The bank required an application that would support its independent equity research and help its diverse clients better understand the complex dynamics of business growth. The application also needed to coordinate research activities across teams and multiple locations, and provide user customization. This required development of modules for clients, analysts, researchers, account administrators and supervisors with different access privileges to view data. Other requirements included the ability to:

• achieve seamless distribution of research across multiple locations through a back-end tool which gave analysts access to upload the research papers in real-time instead of a weekly or fortnightly batch upload
• Address diverse client needs and requirements such as portfolio strategies and access to propriety data, channel checks/surveys, whitepapers, market studies and industry expert consultations.
• provide homepage customization with portfolio view showing latest research documents on companies of interest and real-time tickers populated through RSS feeds by independent researchers and analysts
• integrate with CRM and Earnings Database applications and publishing tools

Solution
Iteamic leveraged its financial services domain expertise to build a proven investment research management solution. The application was developed using J2EE standards and MVC architecture. The core application layer was built on a Jakarta Struts framework (involving JSPs and Servlets), and deployed on a Jakarta Tomcat Application Server on the Linux operating system. With this latest technology, research activities could be seamlessly coordinated across multiple locations while maintaining data integrity and providing end users with easy access to the latest research and forecast through a convenient web-based interface where they can download the latest research papers. Oracle Database Server was used as the backend database to ensure availability and reliability of up-to-date accurate data and the ability to generate detailed and precise reports, charts and data models.

Technology

• J2EE standards and Model View Controller (MVC) architecture
• Jakarta Struts framework (involving JSPs and Servlets)
• Jakarta Tomcat Application Server, Linux operating system
• Oracle Database Server

Benefits
The investment bank gained an application capable of supporting accurate research activities deployed and coordinated across the enterprise. A convenient web-based user interface provided an effective tool for analysts to generate sophisticated reports and charts with a higher level of accuracy and detail. There is instant access to downloadable working models and comparable analysis. The application enables models and projections to be uploaded within 24 hours of key company announcements. The web-based product allows industry experts to provide investment advice to their clients. The portal has features where clients can request for survey, request for setting-up one-on-one calls with advisors, and accept invitations for conferences and events to seek investment advice.