JPMorgan Chase is the largest bank holding company in the United States. With over $2.4 trillion in assets, they are heavily reliant on information technology to run their business efficiently. Astor Wells was charged with system analysis services for their broker-dealer operations which serviced 1.5 million accounts at the time.
Project #1 Fractional share trading
Business Case
The retail brokerage business is very competitive. Heavyweights like TD Ameritrade and ETrade were offering dividend reinvestment plans with fractional share trading (e.g. 0.73 shares), and JPMorgan’s management felt that this capability was necessary to remain competitive. Adapting their existing infrastructure to support fractional share quantities was similar to the Y2K problem prior to year 2000. The systems impacted include order entry, statements/confirms, safekeeping, corporate actions (e.g. 2:1 stock splits), ACATS account transfers, data warehouse, and many more.
Expertise
- Analysis & Design
- Requirements gathering/planning
- Cross-application Data flows
- Issue tracking
- Project management
Project highlights
Astor Wells had two weeks to determine all the impacted systems, devise solutions or work-arounds, and document our findings in an impact statement and risk analysis. After management review, AW prepared project plans, time & cost estimates, functional and technical requirement documents, and status reports. The results were presented to regional managing directors for J.P. Morgan Securities, and development was green-lighted.
Project #2 Order Management System interface design
Business Case
JPMorgan’s brokers and correspondent brokers complained that their order entry systems were antiquated which made it difficult to enter orders in a fast moving market. Management approved a project to modernize the order entry system for stocks, options, and mutual funds. The technology selected was Adobe Flex (now Apache Flex) which offered richer options for user interface design. Unfortunately without product and trading knowledge, the development staff’s early prototypes came up short in user review sessions.
Expertise
- Analysis & Design
- UX User Interface Design
- Gap analysis
- Issue tracking
Project highlights
An order entry screen is simply a form with embedded business rules. Elements of the form are displayed, suppressed, or have unique functions that are determined by the user’s permissions, account restrictions, time of day, and other factors. For example, an account cannot sell a stock that it does not own unless that order is to sell short (if shares are available for loan), or of the customer guarantees to deliver the stock certificates (with management approval).
Astor Wells incorporated these business rules into a compact screen panel that was attractively designed, easy to use, and with safeguards to prevent trading errors.