Customer Story

Investing in a Data Warehouse Reaps Big Returns for Investment Company

Company Overview

Guggenheim Partners is a global investment and advisory financial services firm with more than $240 billion in assets under management. The company has 25 offices around the globe and engages in three primary businesses: investment management, investment banking, and insurance services.

Problem

In the wake of the global financial crisis, Guggenheim Partners recognized it needed a much faster way to analyze its holdings and positions across multiple portfolios, sectors, and customers. As a result, the company struggled to respond to market events in a timely fashion. Guggenheim also questioned the quality of its data and lacked consistency and timeliness in delivering earnings releases. Additionally, Guggenheim was trying to deploy an Enterprise Data Warehouse and needed to test its data. Testing was being conducted by end users only after all pieces were assembled. Completing seven cycles of tests took more than 3 weeks.

Solution

Analytics8 gave Guggenheim more timely and accurate access to its portfolio information. We assembled a single source of fixed income investment data so Guggenheim’s leadership could assess overall exposure across different sectors, and we built a new data warehouse from scratch. To do so, we conducted a discovery process at a very high strategic level in which we interviewed leaders in various areas of the business and established priorities for building the new data warehouse, as well as a business intelligence solution focused on the company’s fixed-income asset management business. The new system pulled together data from Guggenheim’s various operational systems to allow fast and accurate reporting for customers, client managers, and portfolio managers. In addition, Analytics8 also provided quality assurance practices and testing strategies to improve the overall the quality of the data warehouse. This included implementing an automated testing framework to decrease the time to execute testing cycles, and a data quality dashboard that provides insights into data quality issues.

Guggenheim Partners now has a single source for timely and accurate portfolio investment data across all sectors. This has eliminated hundreds of hours previously spent each month to manually assemble Excel-based reporting in order to determine its portfolio exposure. And it has improved earnings release cycles. The company’s investment confidence has increased thanks to quality improvements in its data; the dashboard provides quick investment feedback the business can take action on. Guggenheim has also increased the quality of testing its Enterprise Data Warehouse while decreasing cycle times. It can identify defects earlier in the cycle so they can be fixed before production.

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