Founded in 1955, Wedbush Securities has been a leader in the financial industry, providing its clients with a wide range of services, including private client services and institutional sales, correspondent clearing services, equity research, corporate and municipal finance, equity market making, fixed income trading, and wealth management. Headquartered in Los Angeles, with nearly 100 registered offices, the firm focuses on dedicated service, client financial safety, continuity, and advanced technology.
Challenges
Wedbush Securities had been using a manual data entry system to manage its people, which was inefficient and ineffective. The multi-tiered manual process involved individual notifications to various departments that ate up a considerable amount of time, created significant notification delays, and opened the door to human errors in documentation.
Solutions
"The capabilities that enabled us to achieve a significant ROI with UKG Pro are also helping us manage the complexities of the financial industry," said Kevin Lundby, Senior Vice President of Human Resources for Wedbush Securities.
"We are strictly regulated by the SEC and FINRA, and subject to regular internal and external audits," he explained. "Since working with Pro, our processes have been automated into a one-step solution, saving countless hours of work. With Pro and its workforce analytics, we have visibility into our people with 100% accuracy and can diminish the risk of compliance-related issues."
UKG Pro® Onboarding also is helping Wedbush manage compliance. According to Lundby, Pro ensures that every new hire receives and completes all the required forms, which though often subject to audits, are now easy to monitor electronically. And while Pro's improved processes are helping Wedbush employees increase productivity, managers are also able to use the solution to maximize profitability.
"Managers who oversee profit centers pay very close attention to expenses — their employee costs — because their incentives are driven by their own profitability for their areas," said Lundby. "These managers need to know on a day-to-day basis what their expense line looks like relative to revenue. Before Pro, these managers would need to contact HR for this information, and we would have to undertake a very laborious process to generate lists of employees, their compensation, and employee-related costs. Now, we use the power of UKG Pro People Analytics to create manager dashboards that analyze pay data."
"The capabilities that enabled us to achieve a significant ROI with UKG Pro are also helping us manage the complexities of the financial industry."
Kevin Lundby
Senior Vice President of Human Resources
Results
UKG Pro People Analytics is also helping profit-center managers factor the costs of state regulation into their calculations. Managers need point-in-time reporting, not only to compare overtime data from one pay period with the next, but also to track costs associated with California's new meal-period penalty. According to Lundby, managers are using their business intelligence dashboard to better monitor costs resulting from the penalty, and controlling them in the same way the company manages overtime spending.
