AFTAs 2019: Best Reporting Initiative—Northern Trust

Northern Trust has revamped its enterprise reporting for a more elegant and efficient client experience. The re-platforming of the Northern Trust Online Report Center won the firm the best reporting initiative in the 2019 AFTAs, taking the title from last year’s winners, State Street.

The Northern Trust Report Center is available through the firm’s Passport web portal. It serves clients in 68 countries and supports 28 file formats. The upgrade began in early 2019. 

“It was a behemoth!” says Barb O’Malley, head of client solutions consulting and data and digital product at Northern Trust. “We have more than 10,000 active users and another 78,000 leveraging the platform occasionally, and we generate 3 million reports a month. It’s big and it’s right in the core of our service delivery.”

Northern Trust upgraded Report Center from legacy infrastructure to the cloud, utilizing a Microservices architecture running on the Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service. The new architecture, coupled with the Agile methodology, reduced development time by 50% and allowed the firm to more easily introduce new features. The UI was also redesigned.

The project took seven months from start to minimum viable product, which has been in beta testing since August. All clients will have the new user experience by the end of 2020. “The impact that our digital channels have on servicing our clients is critical to our success,” says Paul d’Ouville, global head of product and client solutions at Northern Trust Asset Servicing. “We are making significant capital investments to provide seamless, omni-channel delivery for our clients. The report center is a huge component of that.”

Ian Castledine, head of digital product at Northern Trust, says the tool will feature predictive analytics in order to generate bespoke workflows for clients and smarter interactive reporting, among other enhancements. “Northern Trust’s strategy is committed to providing data and transparency to clients where, when and how they want it,” he says.