May 31, 2007

By Jason Deign, News@Cisco

Growth, business efficiency and customer service are priorities for any business in the financial services sector. And Charles Stanley, one of the largest independently-owned stockbrokers in the United Kingdom, has achieved all three thanks to a migration to Cisco® Unified Communications.

The company, with 26 regional offices in the United Kingdom, has been a member of the London Stock Exchange since 1852.

The stock-broking business had not changed very much in the country over 200 years, until the de-regulation of the financial markets known as the 'Big Bang' in 1986, when the trading floor of the Stock Exchange was replaced by a screen-based quotation system.

Charles Stanley established its information and communications technology (ICT) department in 1997 with the goal of turning the company into a stockbroker for the 21st century.

The creation of a converged network for data, voice and video that linked all the regional offices and London was central to the ICT strategy.

Today, the Cisco Unified Communications system provides a centrally managed IP telephony system to more than 400 staff at its regional offices and in London. Backup systems are also installed in the company's disaster recovery site to maintain business continuity.

Telephone communications has a crucial role in maintaining strong customer relationships at Charles Stanley.

And extension mobility, where staff can log onto their own phone extension from any Cisco IP Phone or soft-phone within the company network, is an important feature as staff location becomes transparent to the customer.

In the event of a transport strike or bad weather, staff can continue working from home or any of the branch offices.

In addition to business private branch exchange functions, the Cisco Unified Communications system also supports unified messaging, which brings voicemail, email and faxes together into one mailbox for easier access.

It also gives Charles Stanley the ability to broadcast messages to all IP phones using InformaCast (an application developed by Berbee Information Networks), as well as easy-to-use video telephony and IP call recording, provided by Witness Systems.

The ability to record all telephone calls is vital to Charles Stanley in order to comply with the latest financial market legislation, the Market in Financial Instrument Directive (or MiFID), which comes into effect at the beginning of November 2007.

Before Charles Stanley brought all the branch office phone systems together onto a single Cisco Unified Communications system, call recording was an extremely expensive operation as tape recorders had to be installed in every office.

The IT staff had to manage these systems, changing tapes and archiving them. When it came to retrieving a specific call, it took a long time to locate it on the right tape.

Now, all the telephone calls from all branches pass through the central Cisco Unified Communications Manager IP private branch exchange system and every call is saved and indexed as an electronic file on to disk.

Cisco reseller ONI plc, whose Cisco accreditations include four different "Advanced" specializations, supplies ongoing support services and assists the ICT team in development and integration of new services on the Cisco platform.

Keen to extend more unified communications features to all users, the ICT team at Charles Stanley has been conducting field trials of Cisco Unified Communications Manager 6.0, assisted by Cisco experts and ONI.

These trials will allow the company to explore the use of Cisco Unified Presence, Cisco Unified Personal Communicator desktop clients and mobility services.

Presence information gives users the ability to see if the person they want to contact is available and also what devices they prefer to be contacted on.

Mark Smith, ICT manager at Charles Stanley, says: "Our brokers liked the old 'key and lamp' phone systems and one of the features of Cisco Unified Presence is that we can recreate this on the Cisco IP Phones.

"The mobility features are also attractive, particularly the dual-mode handsets and single number reach.

"ONI's experience and the skills of its engineering team in this area have been invaluable and the trials have been very useful in helping us plan our upcoming migration to Unified Communications 5.1."

He adds: "We started the trial with around 20 handsets connected to the Cisco Unified Communications 6.0 appliance. Compared with our current Windows-based Communications Manager system, the Linux-based appliance was a lot simpler to install. We literally plugged it in and connected the phones."

Charles Stanley will be switching its London office over to a Cisco local area network and completing the rollout of Cisco Unified Communications to all staff, bringing the total to more than 800 users.

Smith concludes: "To be a stockbroker for the 21st century, we have to have the best systems. This means having a secure, converged network on which we can deliver all our business services.

"We have built our business on acquiring smaller brokers and with a converged network and unified communications it is easier and quicker to integrate new businesses into the company and provide a common set of services to all our staff."

Jason Deign is a freelance journalist located in Barcelona, Spain.