Oldest Financial Publishing Company Needs 21st Century Publishing System

Since the beginnings of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in 1792, when brokers first congregated on Wall Street, the oldest financial publishing company in the world has served the regulatory and filing needs of publically traded companies. Over time, the company has expanded its offerings to include a wide array of financial reporting services for its clients, which include many of the leading institutions in New York and other financial markets.

Challenge Modernizing a 200-Year-Old Company’s Publishing Operations and Cost Structure

Facing the height of the digital publishing revolution with more than two centuries of accumulated processes, the company was determined to become more flexible in order to respond to increasing competitive pressures. Additionally, because many clients had to develop new financial reporting procedures to meet the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the company had to help them meet accelerated deadlines and tighter workflow schedules.

This financial publisher relied on manual procedures to process information for their clients, often at high-cost locations in the United States. To streamline these procedures and find a lower-cost solution, the publishing company began looking for ways to re-engineer those processes and move operations offshore.

Solution A Dedicated Financial-Publishing Offshore Development Center (ODC)

With its proven track record as a leading KPO (Knowledge Process Outsourcing) provider to the publishing industry, Aptara was a logical choice. As a first step, the company outsourced key functions for two product offerings to Aptara, which established an offshore development center in New Delhi to support the company’s operations. Aptara built a team of knowledge workers (subject matter experts) with advanced degrees in accounting and finance to analyze and process the sensitive financial data of the company’s clients.

Aptara customized its workflows and adapted its own organizational structure to meet the clients’ needs and established an accredited ISO 27001 secure publishing co-facility—backed by a fully redundant network—for the secure transfer of highly sensitive financial data to the United States.

Aptara also developed individual and fully-operational work streams for a wide-range of financial filing documents, including EDGAR 1, EDGAR 2 and other financial reporting streams.

As the relationship grew in complexity, scope and scale, Aptara deepened its own understanding of the client’s business requirements and further integrated operations within the company’s supply chain for processing information.

In all, some 900 Aptara team members are now dedicated solely to this company’s operations, including more than 150 financial analysts and chartered accountants.

Results A Stronger, More Nimble Organization

Since the first stages of the project, Aptara and the financial publisher have built a successful global-sourcing relationship. Aptara now processes the vast majority of the company’s product offerings, including high-end specialty products, amounting to more than two million pages annually. Aptara’s parallel publishing workflows are driving added top-line benefits through the monetization of existing content assets. New product offerings include content management systems and mobile device delivery of clients’ content.

Added Value Outsourcing Solution Drives Significant Company-wide Cost Savings

The outsourcing relationship has enabled the company to realize significant economies of scale. Since 2002, the publishing company:

• reduced the number of co-operation facilities from 21 to 9
• lowered its onshore publishing staffing requirements by 65%
• resulting in annual cost savings of close to $75 million

In addition to cost savings, outsourcing these critical production functions has also produced a wide range of tactical and strategic business advantages for the company, including eliminating investments in fixed infrastructure which lowered the cost of acquisition for human resources and training.