DIGITALLY TRANSFORMING LEGACY OPERATIONS IN ASSOCIATION WITH
STATE STREET GLOBAL ADVISORS
DIGITAL REPORT 2020
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STATE STREET GLOBAL ADVISORS: DIGITALLY TRANSFORMING LEGACY OPERATIONS WRITTEN BY
GEORGIA WILSON
PRODUCED BY
JAMES PEPPER
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JETINDER LALI, CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER AT STATE STREET, DISCUSSES THE COMPANY’S DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF ITS LEGACY SYSTEMS AND ADOPTION OF INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY
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hroughout his 25-year career, Jetinder Lali has been in the asset management industry, working for some of the largest
asset managers in the world, including JP Morgan, BlackRock and UBS. “After becoming somewhat 04
of a veteran within the industry I joined State Street Global Advisors as the Chief Digital Officer.” Lali describes State Street Global Advisors as the third largest asset manager in the world and a part of the world’s largest custodian. In 1993 State Street Global Advisors invented the world’s first exchange-traded fund (ETF), which has since grown to US$6trn organically. “We are innovators, we are leaders and we are collaborators.” Currently in the world of asset management, Lali has seen a shift within the sector that has seen technology taken more seriously. “It has become standard practice that digitalisation is either at the top, or is one of the top priorities of large asset firms. This is a direct result of our customers seeking more digital ways to engage with businesses. Data is also critically important and a challenge for the industry.”
‘Fearless Girl’ by Kristen Visbal, commissioned by State Street Global Advisors (SSGA), was installed on 7 March 2017 outside the New York Stock Exchange
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1978
Year founded
2,500+ Number of employees
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Since joining the company three years ago, Lali has led the company through its digital transformation program to unify its customer experience for the first time. “Due to the size of State Street Global Advisors, we have lots of different divisions and brands. As part of our transformation we have unified our divisions representing ourselves to our customers as one global firm, which took us 18 months to achieve. Now we are working on improving our back-end systems by 06
updating roughly 12 years of legacy systems and redundant websites.”
“ WE RELY HEAVILY ON HAVING A CORE DATA INFRASTRUCTURE TO PROVIDE OUR SERVICES AS RECORD KEEPERS OF OVER 10% OF THE WORLD’S ASSETS” — Jetinder Lali, Chief Digital Officer, State Street Global Advisors
State Street Global Advisors: Who We Are CLICK TO WATCH
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As Lali explains State Street Global Advisors’ digital transformation strategy, he breaks it down into three simple words: “Simplify, unify and amplify. In order to achieve this it is important for us to build the right foundations and decide what our architectural roadmap will look like in order to get us to where we want to be in the future. Over the last 18 months we have certainly taken care of unifying our web experience, data platforms and analytic systems, providing our customers with a 360 degree view. We are also making great w w w.ss g a . com
IBM iX business designers envision brand experiences of the future and make them real.
Explore more at www.ibmix.com
SSGA Develops Next-Generation Digital Experience to Drive ETF Sales and Growth State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) is no stranger to shifting winds in the asset management sector. The organization’s parent company, State Street Corporation, is one of the world’s largest financial institutions. With increasing competition and demand for personalized content across each of its global practices, the investment management arm saw the opportunity to reimagine its digital experience to unify its global presence and more efficiently deliver localized content. Creating a Customer-Centric Digital Experience Platform—and an Operating Model to Support It In collaboration with long-time partner IBM iX, SSGA sought to more deeply understand their users’ needs across all points of digital engagement and build a world-class, frictionless experience to delight their customers. Anchored by several key guiding principles—such as moving from reactive engagement to proactive, enabling self-service, and leveraging data to better understand and refine the journey—SSGA and IBM iX set out to build not only an integrated digital platform to support their needs, but also establish and grow the right content capabilities and digital centers of excellence to support it in order to really drive measurable business value and ROI for the firm. Taking a design-led and human-centered approach, the team built a unified global digital experience platform (DXP) that would be customizable by region, language and investor types, complemented by a marketing data platform (MDP) to surface personalized content with a 360° customer view. IBM iX built the multi-site system on Adobe Experience Manager, replacing multiple custom legacy systems that were costly to
manage and led to disparate experiences. The new platform on AEM 6.3 Content Management System has a simplified and standardized design that leverages a responsive grid, seamless integration, with minimum customizations. To facilitate internal adoption of AEM, IBM iX also created a dynamic set of templates for SSGA’s marketing managers grounded in user-centric design principles to streamline the content delivery process. IBM iX also built a digital asset library and designed a governance model to reinforce brand consistency and efficiency across State Street’s digital ecosystem. Accelerated Adoption Delivers Accelerated Impact Since launching the platform, transitioning operations and training core teams with the support of IBM iX, SSGA has realized significant savings. Enabled by the Adobe Experience Cloud suite of applications, SSGA is now making more data-driven decisions, and can easily view how customers are interacting with their content, unveiling what information is most valuable to clients. Nearly 150 websites have been launched since the transformation, delivering a more consistent global experience in 22+ countries in more than ten languages, serving the needs of institutional users (wealth managers), intermediaries (brokers), ETF retailers and individuals. SSGA has also seen a 3.6X improvement in content accessibility with integration services through Akamai, as well as improved customer satisfaction. Explore more at ibmix.com
S TAT E S T R E E T G L O B A L A D V I S O R S
State Street Global Advisors: High Tech Automation vs. Old School Relationships CLICK TO WATCH
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progress in this area across our sales,
Lali. “We are also working with several
marketing and digital touch points. Our
automation solutions at both a deep
next steps are to look at our legacy
infrastructure level as well as at the
systems and understand which we
user level. Additionally, we are using
need for our operations and which we
automation technology to automate
need to build out.”
workflows, as well as harnessing cloud
To further its digitalisation journey,
technology to streamline our opera-
State Street Global Advisors is cur-
tions allowing us to move faster within
rently harnessing artificial intelligence
the industry.”
(AI), advanced analytics, automation
When it comes to data management,
and cloud. “Within our broader cor-
Lali says the company relies “ heavily
poration we have a data science team
on having a core data infrastructure
where we are currently working on a
to provide our services as custodians
joint advanced analytics project,” says
of over 10% of the world’s assets.
E X E C U T I V E P R OF IL E :
“ WE ARE INNOVATORS, WE ARE LEADERS AND WE ARE COLLABORATORS” — Jetinder Lali, Chief Digital Officer, State Street Global Advisors
Understandably, cybersecurity is incredibly important to us. We have a very robust infrastructure in place and a dedicated team to manage any threats. We are also continuously looking at technology from new providers such as Adobe, where we are starting to look at their cybersecurity services. In addition to Adobe, we currently use Akamai across the organisation.” With digital transformation comes disruption for any organisation,
Jetinder Lali Title: Chief Digital Officer Location: London, UK Jet Lali is the first Chief Digital Officer at State Street Global Advisors, which is one of the world’s leading Asset Management firms, with $2.7 trillion in assets under management. Jet has previously held similar leadership roles in both management consulting and industry including companies such as JPMorgan, Barclays Global Investors, BlackRock and UBS. He has over 20 years of experience in building and advising on market leading digital strategies and capabilities within financial services across all major financial markets, with experience of both B2B and B2C business models.
Lali highlights that, at State Street Global Advisors, the company splits w w w.ss g a . com
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S TAT E S T R E E T G L O B A L A D V I S O R S
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“ ACROSS OUR ORGANISATION WE DEFINED OUR OPERATIONS AND OUR DIGITAL STRATEGY VERY EARLY ON WITH A FOUR-YEAR ROAD MAP IN MIND” — Jetinder Lali, Chief Digital Officer, State Street Global Advisors
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its change management strategy into three key areas: people, process and technology. “Across our organisation, we defined our operations and our digital strategy very early on with a four-year road map in mind. We defined what capabilities we wanted to retain and where we had gaps, as well as the solutions to fill the gaps and potential partners such as IBM, which was very helpful in the simplification and rebuild of our web stack. When it comes to the processes, over the years they have 14
organically grown across our regions resulting in inconsistencies. So, like our technology, we looked to standardise our governance around data, processes and how we build solutions. Finally, in terms of people, we have several hundred working across the digital aspect of the organisation, but a lot of the technology we decided to use was new. As a result we spent a lot of time training our people across the world. Last year alone we did 4,000 hours of training as part of our partnership with Adobe, which we are looking to exceed this year.� Lali also highlights the importance of maintaining communication as part of a change management strategy.
“Everybody wants change, but everyone hates having to change. Therefore, we spend a lot of time communicating and training people on the technology we are using to give people a better understanding of what is possible.” Reflecting on State Street Global Advisors, Lali believes that the company’s biggest strengths are its ability to provide great partnerships for its customers, not just for its products but for its relationships it has across the industry, as well as its collaborative and innovative mindset, to drive the industry forward. “We’ve had many successes over the years, I would say that our biggest successes are our years of operation – over 120 years – as well as being the third largest asset manager in the world, inventing the first US listed ETF, building the first frontto-back platform for the industry and our leadership within environmental and social governance (ESG).”
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STATE STREET GLOBAL ADVISORS ONE LINCOLN STREET, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02111 T 617-786-3000
www.ssga.com
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