How a Major Bank Expanded Its Online Brokerage with an Innovative Charting Experience

The large majority (90%) of Canadians believe that banking has become a lot more convenient because of new technologies, and eight out of 10 (78%) are using online and app-based digital channels to conduct most of their banking transactions.¹ In addition, mobile app‑based banking continues its increase, driven by a strong uptake from the Gen Z and Millennial segments. The same demand exists for convenient brokerage services, and keeping customers highly satisfied with their online experience is essential for success.

This company is the online brokerage arm of one of Canada’s leading financial institutions, providing investors with accessible and reliable online trading products and services. The offering for self-directed services includes a trading platform, mobile application and interactive online events to help customers take their investing knowledge to the next level.

The product manager at the company wanted to elevate the charting capabilities and said, "In trying to modernize our quotation system, it was difficult to find a fully integrated product that would fit our needs in terms of a charting solution. Either it would require a lot of adjustments to fit our needs, or the available libraries would not capture our vision of simplicity and accessibility. Furthermore, our hope was to leverage our partnerships with third-party providers to present a one-stop location to visualize market data. Afterall, there is nothing more talkative to trigger trading behaviors than a complete chart fully customized by a customer." She initiated the search for an appropriate partner.

Pain Points

Members of the product management team needed to upgrade their charting capabilities and were focused on improvements that would create value for customers by delivering simple, yet high-performing tools, that could be easily integrated into the trading platform to increase time to market. They wanted to find a partner they could collaborate with to manage customer expectations by:

—Offering charting features that were most important to customers as soon as possible.
—Gathering customer feedback and quickly addressing any issues that were identified.
—Programming new charting features and delivering them over time.
—Respecting the company's commitment to offer a simple, intuitive and smooth charting tool.

Team members were familiar with ChartIQ and knew that the company was at the forefront of premier charting in the financial services industry. They knew many of the biggest names in finance relied on ChartIQ, and that it would be possible to license the charting packages on a standalone basis. They reached out to the ChartIQ team at S&P Global Market Intelligence ("Market Intelligence") to learn more.

“We regularly upgrade our charting capability to meet customer demand. ChartIQ makes this easy for us, as their teams are constantly enhancing their offering with more comprehensive studies, tools and features.”
—Product Manager

The Solution

ChartIQ specialists from Market Intelligence described how the advanced out-of-the-box functionality of ChartIQ would enable the company to transcend conventional charts and provide customers with the ability to easily create custom data visualizations to capture actionable insights. ChartIQ serves as a complete infrastructure toolkit, boasting exceptional flexibility and seamless integration facilitated by a complete software development kit (SDK). The SDK comprises comprehensive APIs, ready-to-use production-grade user interface (UI) templates, sample implementations, optional add-on modules and extensive documentation. By leveraging the HTML5 Charting Library, the product management team would gain the ability to:

Key Benefits
After comparing charting providers, members of the product management team decided that ChartIQ’s HTML5 Charting Library was the best option and subscribed to the offering. The product manager said, "ChartIQ assisted us with the utilization of the Charting Library. The dedicated support team and comprehensive resource center helped our developers integrate the vast number of studies and charting tools in an incremental way. The Charting Library enabled us to select what was important for our customers and deliver them over time, rather than having to build the entire solution at once and push it out".

In collaboration with ChartIQ, the company is now managing customer expectations the way it wants by:

—Offering charting features that are most important to its customers based on their feedback.
—Continually enhancing the offering and introducing new features over time.
—Meeting the commitment to offer a simple, intuitive and easy-to-use charting tool.

^{'Focus: How Canadians Bank", Canadian Bankers Association, March, March 31, 2023, https://cba.ca/technology-and-banking.}