MarketAxess is a technology-based, international electronic trading platform for the fixed income security market. The company has made bond trading more transparent, simpler and efficient and as a result has attracted over 1400 institutional participants to the MarketAxess platform.
Background
MarketAxess has the DNA of a startup, but also possesses the maturity of a company that’s a change accelerator. The MarketAxess team feels a strong obligation to build technology that creates a level playing field, empowering all market participants to do their best for their clients. To match that drive, the MarketAxess team approached Cognizant Microsoft Business Group to be their partner in developing technologies to bring their global employees and users together and create a more unified environment.
Challenge
To support MarketAxess’ growth and to retain and attract top talent, the company made several key investments. First, MarketAxess moved its New York City office to a more modern environment at Hudson Yards. Second, the company rebranded itself with a new logo and refined mission. Third, the company was looking for a way to develop a stronger company culture and improve worker productivity and satisfaction within its new brand, and across all of its international locations.
Solution
Working with Cognizant MBG, MarketAxess developed a communication strategy, with a new corporate Intranet at its heart, to help cultivate the strong corporate culture and high level of employee satisfaction that MarketAxess envisioned for the company. In late 2018, Cognizant Microsoft Business Group began with the strategy and implementation for MarketAxess’s new and modern Corporate Intranet. Cognizant MBG also assisted with training, adoption and support as the Intranet was rolled out to all corporate users.
Cognizant Microsoft Business Group was selected for their deep SharePoint expertise and history of successful SharePoint rollouts for global organizations. Through a series of working sessions and trainings, the Cognizant MBG team helped MarketAxess build a customized and branded intranet with easy-to-use customization tools so that MarketAxess could manage the site’s evolution quickly and easily, without the need for outside consultants. To accomplish this, Cognizant Microsoft Business Group utilized Bonzai, a SharePoint accelerator. This enables the MarketAxess team to create custom functionalities that really work to empower and enable their team.
The new intranet serves a variety of purposes for MarketAxess. Chiefly, the site functions as a central information hub to provide the most important documents, news and information for employees at all of MarketAxess’s disparate locations. Documents can be organized and accessed easily using comprehensive metadata and tagging.
Marketing utilizes the site to display event information, provide important templates, social media links, as well as a home for timely press releases and external news pieces related to the company. Additionally, the new intranet also serves as a great place to advocate for community and volunteer efforts of the staff and encourage a stronger corporate culture.
In addition to marketing use, the MarketAxess human resources department leverages the site for employee announcements, employee forms, as well as employee manuals, policies and procedure information.
Other company departments possess their own sections of the site to house important departmental information that can be accessed easily by any employee around the globe, making MarketAxess’s new intranet an excellent source of self-service information providing greater employee independence.
The Cognizant MBG team helped to train internal subject matter experts within MarketAxess to use the tool and manage the administration and governance of the platform in order to keep the information fresh and optimize use of their new intranet. Since the launch, the MarketAxess team has worked to build out additional departments with their own metadata and designs and are continuing to grow their intranet, creating an environment that suits all their global needs. They were also able to integrate third-party tools utilized by MarketAxess, including Slack. This helps to marry their technologies in one place and encourage the adoption of collaboration tools that can make every employee’s workplace experience more streamlined and modern.
The project was led by the New York City headquarters, then rolled out globally to all offices, from North America to London, other European locations, as well as the Asia offices.
Results
Partnering with Cognizant Microsoft Business Group on this important company initiative has ensured that MarketAxess was able to meet its business goals on time and within budget. Some of the key benefits MarketAxess has realized are:
- Heightened levels of employee productivity and satisfaction
- Company information is communicated in real-time
- Important data/documents are easily searched and accessed
- Employees can operate more independently and have reduced the need for support services
In addition to this, MarketAxess’s employees across the globe now share a unified spirit and understand their role as one MarketAxess team ensuring that MarketAxess will remain the leading fixed income security platform.
The name of their new intranet, myMax, speaks directly to this renewed vision. The term “my” helps to create the understanding that each individual at MarketAxess is part of the global team, and each person can leverage the self-service nature of the intranet to accomplish goals. MAX is a combination of MA (for MarketAxess) and X (short for exchange).
MarketAxess and its core values and vision are the well-spring for team culture inspiration and the myMAX intranet is the place that translates that inspiration in to a live, connected space to share and exchange ideas, information, history, headlines, and to celebrate global and regional distinguishability.
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