IG began life in 1974 as Investors Gold, providing an innovative way for retail investors to speculate on the price of gold. Since then they have grown to become a leading player in the spread betting and CFD markets, with net global trading revenues of around £370m, a market capitalisation of £2.2 billion, making them a FTSE250 with operations in 15 countries and a staff of 1,000 employees supporting over 126,000 clients around the world.

The challenge:

In a drive to leverage the huge volumes of sales and trade data (average of over 4 million transactions globally per month), IG had initiated a project to build a new Data Warehouse and implement new reporting tools to provide Finance and the Business with a close to real-time view of underlying business data to support sales, marketing and planning.

IG selected an Oracle toolset, including an Oracle 11g data warehouse and various Hyperion EPM solutions (Planning, Essbase).

The solution:

SystemsAccountants were retained as a specialist finance systems resource partner to the initiative and during a two year period supplied a Hyperion Panning Solution Architect to design the new planning system, an Essbase/Hyperion Planning developer with SQL skills to execute development and build, and two SQL Support specialists to manage the existing data warehouse, support the project team and help to deliver the new Oracle data warehouse.

The outcome:

We subsequently recruited a Finance Systems Manager to join IG on a permanent basis, and they were tasked with stewardship of the Hyperion environment and with delivering discrete finance systems projects such as the implementation of Intellimatch for bank reconciliations and the ongoing data warehouse build. Reporting into the Group FC but also working closely with the CRO, the Head of FP&A and Group IT, they are a key lynchpin between the business and IT.