A financial titan. Four thousand individual sites. One ingenious solution.
Providing their advisors with full marketing capabilities is critical to Raymond James’ operations. So when an advisor joins the company, Raymond James provides them with an individual marketing site — no small feat when it comes to accommodating their 7,800+ advisor roster. See how we created a breakthrough scalable platform that continues to grow with Raymond James staff, in practically real-time.
The Situation
Desperately seeking simple
Continued growth is essential to every global financial services business. Since its inception in 1962, Raymond James has established itself as a leader whose expertise continues to climb upward.
As Raymond James grew, however, they realized they needed to update their existing website architecture to keep pace with their growth trajectory:
The business relied on 7 different technology platforms to support their advisors’ unique sites
Each advisor site could take anywhere from hours to days to launch — hampering their ability to do business right away
Sites were not responsive — and often translated to disjointed experiences on mobile platforms
The Response
Develop a singular site architecture to support everyone
Instead of applying a simple fix to the situation, we adopted an ambitious mindset: create a Sitecore experience that could handle web traffic across thousands of sites as well as rapidly deploy new sites for incoming advisors.
Proof before promises
Supporting thousands of individual sites through a single solution required extensive expertise, an eye for detail and just the right amount of daring. Based on careful calculations, we built a proof of concept using Sitecore architecture that could accommodate unprecedented demands.
2900+Locations throughout the U.S., Canada and overseas
3 Million+Client accounts
~$725 BillionIn managed client assets
Raymond James was so impressed by the POC environment that they wanted to push demands to 350 page requests per second — a bandwidth that the test again handled with relative ease.
The Outcome
A proof of concept that validated how Horizontal can stretch typical architecture into new spaces for high-demand global enterprise clients.
Account for individual needs
With nearly 8,000 individual advisors on its roster, Raymond James wanted to provide each of their public-facing professionals an opportunity to share their own story and style. We answered this need by creating multiple “semi-templated” site options — featuring components that could be customized with advisor-specific content and assets.
Content within minutes
Time is money. This especially holds true for new advisors when they join Raymond James. Instead of waiting for days for new advisor sites to be published, we challenged ourselves to create a seamless CMS experience that would reduce the deployment of new site to a few minutes.
In addition, we invested in “create once, publish everywhere” capabilities to deliver global content across any screen and device.
The Result
One experience. A global advantage.
Our work for Raymond James proved our ability to deliver thousands of unique and compelling user experiences via a single, efficient, scalable platform. But beyond solving for today, this foundation allows Raymond James to accelerate their marketing capabilities for both the core brand and advisors for years to come.
