Trust Company of America

TCA offers custodial services to a wide range of clients, from young families that have $10,000 to invest in an IRA, to high net-worth individuals with hundreds of millions of dollars in assets. The company’s strategy is to offer the same trading experience to all types of clients. Accordingly, TCA needed a system that could bundle trades from thousands of customers simultaneously, execute a single trade, and then break down and distribute the transactions back to the individual accounts all in real time.

The TCA core application platform includes what-if trading; complex algorithms that execute calculations to test a financial model using different assumptions and scenarios that change continuously, along with relevant regulations.

In addition, legislation now calls for custodial companies to provide accurate cost basis reporting on all trades and holdings. To meet this requirement, TCA must export every trade daily to a third-party company, then import updated information the next morning.

A typical relational database management system (RDBMS) would require eight or more indexed tables, and multiple nested joins, to implement what-if trading and provide the functionality TCA needed to satisfy its clients as well as regulators. Not only would this estimated solution be difficult to administer, it would also run into significant costs. Service provider estimates were approximately $500,000 annually to set up and maintain, and proposals estimated at least two years to build.