An Integration of Web Service and Workflow to a Wealth Management Order Placement System: A Case Study of International Brokerages

With the increase in personal wealth and organization sizes, there is also an increase in their assets. So, there is a great demand of professionals to manage these assets and coordinate investment activities in order to maintain the growth. Wealth management services are now widely offered by banks, trusts companies, and brokerages. As the financial market becomes well-developed worldwide, the variety of financial products also increases: equities, mutual funds, bonds, securities, foreign currencies, and derivatives (like options, futures, forwards, and swaps). As a wealth management system (WMS) plays the role of an order placement hub, it becomes more and more complicated during each enhancement to support order placement of additional kinds of financial products. This is because a WMS requires different channels to communicate with different instrument markets. For an international investment company, the problem comes more complicated because the order placement processes are heterogeneous in different countries and locations. In fact, trading systems for different instrument markets of different countries and even different cities are different. Workflows are also hard to coincide with different sites. Therefore, we propose the use of Web services to implement the workflow of order placement process