NorthStar SOA Transforms Wealth Management Technology Approach

Unique among wealth management software vendors, NorthStar employs a contemporary Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that provides wealth management firms a flexible yet cost-efficient approach to integrating data, wealth management products, disparate applications, and entitlements into NorthStar wealth workflows.

This leading-edge SOA structure allows NorthStar software to co-exist and integrate with existing IT infrastructure consisting of advisory tools, analytics, data systems of record, and mid- and back-office systems. As a result, IT departments can deliver a high-performance advisor desktop with unprecedented flexibility, allowing wealth management firms to eliminate point applications and unnecessary middleware, increase business agility, and lower total cost of ownership.

NorthStar offers the industry's first and only SOA-based wealth management software that meets IBM’s rigorous SOA certification requirements.

"SOA is an increasingly important business requirement for organizations because of the business flexibility it enables," says Sandy Carter, vice president, IBM SOA and WebSphere. "NorthStar’s commitment to SOA provides its customers with a powerful way to reduce integration costs while rapidly deploying operational SOA applications."

NorthStar SOA Innovations

Logical Data Model

• Brings data from existing systems into NorthStar applications, workflows, and services, eliminating data replication, redundancy, and re-keying.
  
  
• Provides advisors real-time data access and a consolidated view of data across multiple disparate systems of record such as security masters, ledger systems, and client relationship management (CRM).
  
  
• Uses a comprehensive enterprise Domain Object Model that supports financial advisory functionality such as asset allocation, investor profiles, performance, and market data.

XML Import Tool

• Loads and maps thousands of wealth management products into the firm-wide NorthStar Product Catalog.
  
  
• Imports real-time market feeds and multiple product classification schemata such as Morningstar’s and Lipper's.
  
  
• Enables wealth management firms to execute an open-architecture product strategy.

Polymorphic Integration Framework

• Increases integration flexibility by consolidating and distributing all types of services, from calculators to applications, into NorthStar applications, workflows, and services.
  
  
• Enables performance optimization across loosely coupled or tightly coupled Enterprise Service Bus environments.
  
  
• Supports modular and granular services integration versus a monolithic, one-size-fits-all structure, allowing direct integration to web services or databases as needed.

Holistic Entitlement Center

• Emulates entitlements from existing systems, ensuring NorthStar users access views and data appropriate to their role and responsibilities.
  
  
• Increases system administrator efficiency by importing CRM entitlements, client service events, and security policies into NorthStar.
  
  
• Strengthens compliance by automatically restricting access to client data already established by existing systems.