CASE STUDY

amarillo + YCharts

 

Meet DJ Hunt, VP & Investment Officer at Amarillo National Bank (ANB)

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About

Founded in 1892, ANB is the largest family-owned bank in the nation. Its asset management division has $2.3 billion in assets under management, spread across about 1,800 accounts. Priding itself on standing up for the little guy, ANB provides small businesses with premier banking and investment services.

The Challenge

As Vice President and Investment Officer at ANB, DJ Hunt had grown increasingly frustrated with using an outdated technology to manage reports, run mutual fund and ETF models, and build communications for clients and prospects. He found his investment research platform, Zephyr, was causing him and his team too much manual effort, having to manually build reports with 1,000 cells of data into Excel spreadsheets. Not only did this process take up vast amounts of time, but it often led to error-filled data sets.

The DOL fiduciary rule and the pressure on active managers to justify fees to investors had been on DJ’s mind, which prompted him to consider migrating to a technology platform that could better enable his business to be more efficient and future ready. DJ understood that there needed to be a better way, and he began to evaluate the tools and technology that ANB was currently using.

 

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Onboarding for YCharts was simple. We forwarded over our proprietary model, and got it back the way we wanted with a quick turnaround.

The Solution

A quick internet search for financial data landed DJ on YCharts. “We did our due diligence and decided to replace Zephyr. After thorough research, we found YCharts to be more userfriendly on the front end and, as far as the output, YCharts was easier for our customers to understand.”

As soon as DJ got to know YCharts and met with his account management and support teams, he decided to purchase three licenses for his staff. They were up and running on the platform after one phone call and the exchange of a few emails.

DJ wanted to automate and improve his Excel modeling process. He needed data dynamically

inserted into his model to save time, but he also needed it to be flexible enough that he could tweak it to speak to his clients effectively.

“Onboarding for YCharts was simple,” said DJ. “We forwarded over our proprietary model, and got it back the way we wanted with a quick turnaround."

"Our prior process was holding us back — it was impossible to format our models in a time efficient manner. We were printing and hand- entering data into each cell, which took an entire day. Now, it takes 20 minutes to run the numbers. We have more time in front of our customers, instead of spending time entering numbers in a spreadsheet.”

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We each have our own dashboard customized. We’re also daily users of the website, and weekly users of the Excel Add-in. What we’ve used so far has been pretty flawless, and we are looking forward to getting into it more.

The Results

With three team members using YCharts, ANB is discovering time savings that lead to more efficiency across the company. The team is raving about three of the main benefits of YCharts: 1) the easy creation of graphical and tabular visuals for clients; 2) the Excel Add-in, an extension of the YCharts tool that allows you to create a model once, then update it with a single click; and 3) the ability to customize their YCharts dashboard.

“We each have our own dashboard customized,” said DJ.

“We’re also daily users of the website, and weekly users of the Excel Add in. What we’ve used so far has been pretty flawless, and we are looking forward to getting into it more.”

The user-friendliness and customizable features are providing substantial value for ANB. “Processes that used to take us a whole day, now take only a few minutes,” said DJ. “Having back this time allows us to focus more attention on growing our AUM than on managing the administrative elements of our business."

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Processes that used to take us a whole day, now take only a few minutes. Having back this time allows us to focus more attention on growing our AUM than on managing  the administrative elements of our business.

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Success Made With YCharts

These solutions help ANB save time and improve client communications.

 
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