Designing a cloud-based trading analytics report creation product for a huge investment management firm

Brief

The sales traders who curate the newsletter had to share detailed analytical reports of the market to high-end clientele every day. Each sales trader has about 100-300 clients on average. Clients based on their interest subscribe to receive newsletters from multiple traders on domain and industry-specific analysis.

A high-level ideal flow should be: Sign-in, pick a template, edit, curate, run a compliance check, set a target audience, and publish.

Before publishing, the system checks the content for Compliance and regulatory guidelines, which the user can choose to ignore or correct. Users also need to select the target users from the Distribution List based on region, add product tags and send.

The purpose of the reports and newsletters was to provide users with information without influencing their purchasing and investment decisions. These goals were set up after a lot of discussion with the business and sales teams.

• Sales trader gets easy and quick access to research.
• Report from each desk should use a template to improvise consistency with a custom logo and layout.
• No learning curve – system guides the trader on how to publish.
• Built-in search to suggest similar articles published from the same firm.
• Search integration for users to find articles easily.
• Option for easy formatting of the content.
• Content in the newsletter to show highlighted parts, summary, signature, and from the desk of the user.
• Compliance and regulation reviews should be automated before publishing. System highlights compliance issues and shows recommendations.
• Tech to be majorly upgraded from word press to react.

Traders are always in high demand and we had limited access to the busy and hectic trading floor but we got a chance to interview a few users and observe how they went about their work.

• Users were asked questions on what was their day like and what were some of the difficulties they faced while curating, publishing.
• We conducted an expert review session to get an insight into the end-to-end process of report creation to publishing. This gave the team a complete overview of the process and pointed out what were some of the problems that had to be addressed.

Tags for users to be able to look for information easier and faster.

*These are just representations of the original implementation

This project was ignored and had a very limited budget. After the product was introduced, it quickly became an org-wide tool.