SignatureFD Case Study: Automating What Felt Impossible

The Problem

Background

SignatureFD is a $9 billion registered investment advisor headquartered in Atlanta with an additional office in Charlotte, North Carolina. The firm takes a holistic approach to wealth management, helping families across areas including custodial accounts, alternative investments, and insurance. Their goal: to impact the lives of 10,000 families.

As CIO, Laura Hubbell focuses on ensuring the firm's technology supports its teams in serving clients effectively at scale. But one persistent challenge had resisted resolution for years: an integration between the firm's portfolio management system and its custodians that simply did not work the way it needed to.

"We had worked for probably years with the portfolio management system, with the custodians directly, to figure out how can we make this easier, how can we do this more automatically," Hubbell said. "Throughout that time we had glimmers of hope but never something that really solved the problem, and solved the problem well enough that we didn't have to do anything."

SignatureFD does not have a full in-house development team. The firm's staff could have eventually worked through the problem, but the time investment would have been enormous. "We could figure out how to by spending lots of time, lots and lots of time training and getting up to speed," Hubbell acknowledged. "But it just seemed like hitting the easy button to be able to bring somebody in who had done this before."

The Solution

Through conversations with Fraction, Hubbell and her team realized that the automation challenge they had been struggling with for years was solvable, provided they brought in the right talent.

Fraction placed Jeff, a developer with experience in the specific systems and integrations SignatureFD needed. What set the engagement apart was not just Jeff's technical expertise but his ability to bridge the communication gap between a financial services team and a software engineering workflow.

"The experience has exceeded our expectations," Hubbell said. "Seeing that you guys have the expertise that you need to click the right buttons and suggest the right path, but also the kind of context and situational awareness to understand what we're trying to say when we don't speak the same language. We don't know all the things that you do. And being able to say, 'Okay, given what your goal is, here's what I think we need to do.'"

The Results

The Fraction engagement delivered what years of internal effort and vendor conversations had not: a working automation that removed a significant burden from the SignatureFD team.

Immediate Team Impact: The reaction from the team said it all. "Just the cheers that we got from the team when they heard that we had automated this that has just been a pain point -- I mean, just a load off everybody's shoulders, has been awesome to see," Hubbell said.

Achieving the "Unachievable": Beyond the technical deliverable, the engagement gave SignatureFD confidence that problems they had assumed were unsolvable were, in fact, within reach. "To be able to easily do something that maybe people didn't imagine they would be able to do -- even if you're not sure something can be done, to have that sounding board to say, 'Is this possible?' and hear somebody say, 'Yes, and we have done it before' -- has been really great," Hubbell said.

A Strategic Capability for Firms Without Dev Teams: Hubbell framed the value of working with Fraction in broader industry terms. "In today's world, we're all going to have to use technology to its utmost capabilities," she said. "Especially for firms that aren't at the place where we have full teams of developers, something like this is just going to be vital for a lot of us to keep doing this at scale. Let the humans do what the humans do best and let the computers do what the computers do best. Find a way to make that happen. Fraction is a huge part of that for us and I think could be for a lot of people."

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