Calastone is a highly successful technology company. Its solution is middleware for the global funds industry, translating messages between different counterparties, such as order instructions, into formats which each can easily understand and act on. Calastone’s value grows with every institution that uses its platform and, thanks to these network effects, it has seen exponential growth, evidenced by the fact that today it is working with over 3,500 clients in 53 countries and territories, processing £250 billion of investment value each month.

In 2019, in large part owing to the growth it had seen in message volume and related service requests, Calastone decided to seek an external software solution to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of its operational service desk.

The challenges they faced, which they sought to address to improve scalability, were as follows:

Calastone evaluated several solutions to address its needs. For instance, it assessed Einstein from Salesforce, since Salesforce is its CRM system used for recording all of its customer interactions.

Calastone ultimately selected Jaid because of the flexibility the solution offered. Jaid is a system of intelligence that sits between multiple systems of record, such as CRM or fund administration platforms, and multiple client interaction channels, such as email clients or team collaboration tools like Slack. As such, it is able to query and draw insight from multiple data sources and use this intelligence to automate, and present information, into multiple workflows and communication channels.

As Calastone has found, the architecture of the Jaid platform gives it several advantages over other solutions in the market, such as:

The Jaid solution went live four months after the system had been selected. System set-up, integration and testing were all achieved within two months. The timeline was made longer by two factors; Calastone desired several weeks of parallel testing, and some query types took time to build enough data to train Jaid effectively.

The accurate handling of customer enquiries has greatly automated workflows and addressed the challenges described above. Now, all communications are logged. The system prompts advisors to respond if they have not answered the query within the time frame required, obviating the need for manual checks. Further, there is minimal time or productivity lost during shift changeovers since everything is recorded and categorized correctly in the CRM system. As predicted at the outset of the project, the number of enquiries recorded in the CRM increased by over 30% once the Jaid system was live, without any commensurate increase in emails or calls, indicating that there was significant underreporting in the status quo.

The automation has saved time, but the solution’s benefits have gone far beyond this.

It is estimated that each operational analyst saves around 4 hours a week, not having to do manual work or checks that are now automated by the system. Individually, this time saving is impressive, but in aggregate across a team, it really starts to add up. Moreover, in having to do less manual work, focusing on what matters, the role becomes more enjoyable, helping Calastone to recruit and retain high-calibre people in the team.

But, it is the management insights where Calastone believes that most value has been delivered by the system. As Mike Davies, Head of Global Operations at Calastone, says:

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