Brokerage Business Answers the Call for Quality Voice Trading with NETSCOUT

Customer Profile

This U.S.-based company provides banking, insurance, investment, mortgage, loan, and consumer financial services to more than 70 million worldwide customers. With billions of dollars in assets, the company prioritizes customer service experience at more than 5,000 branch locations, thousands of ATM’s, contact centers, and brokerages, as well as via on-line banking and mobile devices. 

The company is a long-time nGeniusONE customer, with numerous information technology (IT) users taking advantage of NETSCOUT^® smart visibility and real-time analytics for proactive monitoring and troubleshooting across the business. 

The Challenge

The company’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) is promoting digital transformation initiatives to improve performance of the technologies used to efficiently deliver financial transactions for customers. These projects include undertaking lift-and-shift application workload migrations to software-defined networking (SDN) and hybrid cloud platforms. 

One IT team is overseeing implementation of several next-wave digital transformation projects, including updating the trading platform used by brokers in their client service centers to an intelligent, voice-based turret solution that includes Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking and IT connectivity technology. 

While the company was widely using NETSCOUT for monitoring and Help Desk ticket troubleshooting across the business, the IT team responsible for the new trading platform did not use nGeniusONE. They instead relied on another vendor’s analytics and data sources, which had IT-perceived limitations regarding Unified Communications & Collaborations (UC&C) analytics and platform security. 

Given the need to safeguard trade precision across the company’s brokerage business, IT had also identified security requirements for any new visibility sources that they would deploy for these digital transformation projects. As a result, IT wanted to certify that technology before deployment across their network. 

Needing to make this digital transformation project a success, the management team was now examining the viability of other technology approaches, including possibly extending their use of NETSCOUT.

Solution in Action

The company is successfully addressing their digital transformation initiatives by expanding their smart data visibility from NETSCOUT. As a result, the business is fully capitalizing on the next-generation turret trading platform advancements by deploying NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances to transform network traffic monitored at 20+ brokerage locations and remote offices into smart data used by nGeniusONE for granular analysis of application performance. 

It was critical for IT to gain deep-dive UC&C performance analytics from granular monitoring of the voice-based trading platform. That is where nGeniusONE workflows really answered the call for IT, offering: 

• Real-time Service Dashboard views into voice technology performance and service alert conditions 
• UC-specific Service Monitors (e.g., Media Monitor, SIP Monitor) providing views into customer-specific applications 
• Analysis of UC&C service enablers and protocols supporting trading platform performance across multiple call servers and all brokerage locations 

The IT team collaborated with a dedicated NETSCOUT team to ensure the ISNG technology met company security safeguards required for production-level deployment. 

The Results

The risk for replacing brokerage technology platforms is high – missing a stock trade due to an issue with voice quality could cost brokerage customers millions of dollars, while adversely impacting company reputation. The company is mitigating such risks by leveraging NETSCOUT smart visibility and nGeniusONE analytics to monitor how their new trading platform is performing at the client service center and remote brokerage locations. 

The company is also extending the return on investment offered by their Cisco, Avaya, and Mitel technologies, with these UC solutions now fully supported by the open architecture of their new trading platform.