Company Overview

Raymond James Financial is a leading diversified financial services company providing private client group, capital market, asset management, banking, and other services to individuals, corporations, and municipalities. The company has approximately 8,700 financial advisors.

The Opportunity

Company growth and the pace at which new business services were being introduced into production strained Raymond James’ highly automated application and data workflows. One business service alone delivered hundreds of thousands of customer intelligence reports to advisors nationwide within a 60-minute window before markets opened each day. Overall workflow volume was already increasing around 10 percent annually before a new application scaled beyond expectations and soon accounted for about 40 percent of the company’s total daily workflows. Raymond James wanted a scalable way to support its business needs while also continuing to meet stringent service level agreement (SLA) and regulatory requirements.

The Solution

Control-M was the first resource the firm looked to for help managing its increasing workflow volume and sophistication.

“Over 700 different applications, from HR to tax reporting, are leveraging Control-M,” says Chris Haynes, associate director of IT operations services at Raymond James Financial. “Our day-to-day is all executed through Control-M.”

File transfers account for about 35 percent of daily workflow volume, and Raymond James made them more reliable and scalable by consolidating activity with Control-M Managed File Transfer. The platform also gave business users the power to create and monitor their own file transfers and other workflows with its extensive self-service features.

Raymond James was able to increase the file transfer volume it could support by using the cyclical process functionality in Control-M. This significantly reduced volume by bundling multiple transfers into single jobs that repeated, instead of treating each as a separate job.

“Overall performance improved and the recovery process is much, much easier,” says Haynes. “Control-M has been a game changer. Our previous tool provided no insight into dependency, mapping, or any of what we get with Control-M. That’s been impactful because we’re delivering hundreds of thousands of files at a breakneck pace.”

Business Results

Raymond James has documented the following benefits:

• 10 percent annual growth in daily workflows
• 80 percent reduction of individual file transfer jobs with cyclical processing
• 60 percent fewer service requests from giving employees self-service access
• Multi-week audit process reduced to one day

Looking Ahead

With workflows growing and financial services constantly evolving, Raymond James will continue to democratize innovation by expanding self-service.

“Control-M is really about collaboration,” says Haynes. “We now have close to 700 users across the enterprise interacting with Control-M, logging in and actively looking at their applications’ status. This includes business users, developers, data teams, and more. That’s been incredibly beneficial to our story, our growth, our maturation, and the whole continuous improvement process.”

Raymond James will also continue to work closely with BMC to take advantage of new capabilities and innovation.

“A lot of what we can do is predicated on regulatory [requirements]. We must be confident, thorough, and safe with everything new we introduce. One of the things I know I can count on BMC for is forward thinking. They are listening to customers about challenges, disruptive technologies, and security concerns,” says Haynes. “BMC is ahead of the game for financial services.”