Financial Advisory Software Firms Sees Business Doubling

Orion’s platform gathers and analyzes data on client investments, allowing firms to view their overall performance, as well as identifying weak or strong points in their business strategy. This presents its own hurdle, though. There is a LOT of data to wade through: 51 terabytes of it, in fact. Finding a BI tool that could handle this volume without sacrificing granularity was not going to be easy. Before implementing a BI tool, Orion used a manually built, flexible, and customizable reporting platform for operational reporting. So far, so good - except, by the time they generated each business metrics report and sent it to the client several weeks after the month ended, it was already out of date. Plus, the data was static, so clients couldn’t delve in to check the details or context. They only had headline figures, giving them an idea of overall performance. If they wanted to analyze this in any way, they’d have to request a special data query. This could take a day to develop. Orion realized that the company needed to take the leap from business metrics to business intelligence. Their customers needed a platform with better visualizations and direct access to accurate, up-to-date data, in order to make informed business decisions. Orion had executed a proof of concept by integrating an Excel interface into their API to get a feel for what customers wanted. The first approach was to create a dimensional model of the data, push it to firms using an SQL Server and teach them how to connect data to their current data visualization tool. However, Orion customers found dashboard-building to be too complex. Often, they didn’t yet know or understand what they wanted to get out of their data. Clearly, they would need a solution that was ready to deploy out-of-the-box and accessible by all users - not just those with IT expertise.

Orion is a premier portfolio accounting SAAS provider for advisors. Its 950+ clients manage assets spanning 1.5 million accounts and totaling nearly $375 billion. Orion’s platform gathers and analyzes data on client investments, allowing firms to view their overall performance, as well as identifying weak or strong points in their business strategy. The company faced challenges with their existing static reporting solution, which provided outdated information and lacked interactivity. Orion needed a more dynamic and real-time business intelligence tool to meet their clients' needs for better visualizations and direct access to accurate data.