Financial Matters

The solution accelerators are designed to be extended and customized by partners leading to reduced development time and increased quality. The accelerators are packaged with a set of production ready building blocks that consist of re-usable components and technical guides. The building blocks may be used within the context of a solution accelerator or form the basis for developing new solutions.

Adobe Solution Accelerator for Account Enrollment

Improve account enrollment while driving consistency and efficiency across channels and products. With Adobe LiveCycle ES and the Account Enrollment solution accelerator, you can minimize repeated data entry, streamline account processing and setup, and deliver tailored information to customers with ease.

Adobe Solution Accelerator for Correspondence Management

Ensure customer communications are consistent, tailored, and cost efficient by managing all of your correspondence on a single platform. With Adobe LiveCycle ES and the Correspondence Management Solution accelerator, you can automate all kinds of correspondence — from welcome packages and confirmations to proposals and claim letters — while ensuring communications are accurate, compliant, and secure.

Supporting these new solution accelerators, there are additional technology building blocks (Selection and Capture, Content Creation, Correspondence Generation) and updates to the existing On-Demand Assembly building block.

For further information including referencing the solution guides and technical documentation or to download these new releases, please visit http://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/solutionaccelerators/

Continue reading "New Financial Services Solution Accelerators for LiveCycle ES" »

Posted by Molly Bailie at 11:21 AM | Permalink

I think it is fair to say that we’ve been overwhelmed by the negative news in the banking industry. I can hardly read an article, blog post or hear a presentation that does not start out telling us how we are all doomed. While I believe that we’ll continue to see contraction in the market and increase in regulation and oversight, the outstanding question is… Is innovation also dead?

It is clear that technology spend is decreasing for most FIs; TowerGroup estimates a -4.4% decline in North America. Much of today’s IT budgets support existing platforms and technology services so little of the traditional budget is left for innovation. For many banks, this will stymie innovation but for others who are creative, it will position them to take advantage of the new reality. But how do you innovate?

Banks must rethink their model around innovation. It needs to move beyond product innovation to incorporate all three innovation paradigms: product, operational and business model (including new entrants). In doing so banks will find new areas to recoup lost revenue, further drive cost savings and implement better risk mitigation. Recently innovation has been conservative in nature as no one wants to own “the project that failed”. Banks in this new world need to think more like venture capitalists, willing to invest in 10 new projects knowing that they may have only 1 home run, hit a couple singles and that the rest will strike out. Yes this is a risk but banks that do, can reap big rewards.

Banks taking advantage of the opportunity to innovate now will widen the competitive gap over their competition, win the customer who are “shifting to quality” and create the institutions that will emerge over the next few years to drive the new financial services industry.

Posted by Molly Bailie at 1:57 PM | Permalink

Adobe MAX 2008 is taking place in San Francisco this week. Each year, hundreds of designers, developers and other self-professed geeks gather to hear about the latest in Adobe innovations and how their peers in the industry are creating engaging experiences with Adobe technologies.

This year’s MAX Awards - which saw over 700 entries were received from 30 different countries – included a number of leading edge applications for the financial services industry which were part of the Enterprise award category. Here is a quick look at three of those applications.

StateStreet.com – Honorable Mention
State Street clients are constantly looking to maximize investment returns and mitigate risk across a complex, changing investment landscape. To better enable clients to meet their investment goals, State Street introduce Mystatestreet.com. which is currently available to more thanks 30,000 users worldwide. With the help of Adobe solutions – including Adobe LiveCycle ES, Adobe Flex3, and Creative Suite 2 Web Premium – customer gain faster, more comprehensive insight into portfolio performance and investment options. Check it out for yourself: http://my.statestreet.com

AIG Personal Lines – Honorable Mention
Highlighting its commitment to outstanding customer service, AIG Personal Lines built a dynamic system to automatically generate claims correspondence using Adobe LiveCycle ES solutions.

NASDAQ Market Replay – Enterprise Category Winner!
The powerful NASDAQ Market Replay application enables investment professionals to replay the market by slowing it down to the millisecond lever for moment-in-time insight into trade histories. Sign up for your own free trial today: https://data.nasdaq.com/MR.aspx

Adobe MAX is a unique industry event the that brings together the extended Adobe community for everything innovative and inspirational. It’s a great opportunity to meet your peers face to face and to meet the top experts on Adobe technologies. At this point it’s probably too late to join the excitement in San Francisco, but I’m sure we’ll be announcing the 2009 venue and dates soon. Or, you can always join us for MAX Europe in Milan, December 1-4, 2008, or MAX Japan in Tokyo, January 29-30, 2008.

“Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.” – William Pollard

- Nicole Kealey

Posted by at 2:29 PM | Permalink

In today's environment financial services executives have plenty to keep them awake at night; earnings declines, toxic portfolios, the lack of liquidity in the interbank markets, decisions as to accepting governmental investment and looming new regulation. In times such as these it is often easy to lose sight of the fundamentals and yet the current market conditions offers some unique opportunities to those firms ready to take advantage of this instability.

One clear lesson of the current crisis is the value of a strong core deposit base. Many of the institutional failures we have seen over the past several months have resulted from short term liquidity problems rather than fundamental viability issues. Similarly, those firms that best weathered the current market disruption have been those with both broad and deep deposit franchises.

So, how does one build a strong deposit base? In normal market conditions building core deposits has traditionally been a protracted and expensive process, often including building an extensive branch network, offering off-market financial incentives and other tactics. Today's environment, however, is anything but normal and presents unique opportunities.

Between Merrill Lynch, Wachovia, WAMU, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and the other firms who have failed or been acquired, we estimate that there are some 40 million customers who are "in play" today and these customers represent an enormous potential deposit pool. One only has to look at Jamie Dimon's willingness to acquire WAMU or Dick Kovacevich's eagerness to acquire Wachovia to see the value of these customers.

Any market disruption creates opportunities to acquire new customers and today's spate of mergers and acquisitions have placed an enormous potential deposit pool in play. To take advantage of this opportunity the key will be a firm's focus on customer engagement. "Engagement" goes beyond simply customer service and invokes issues of emotive attachment and trust and this will be, perhaps, the key strategic battlefield of the next several years.

- Chip Greenlee

Posted by at 12:01 PM | Permalink

This year’s SIBOS event was SWIFT’s largest ever with over 8000 participants from around the world. Traditionally SIBOS is an event where business gets done. Senior bankers and the vendors who service them, spend a week together learning about trends in the industry, cutting deals, and selling product.

As luck would have it this year’s SIBOS coincided with one of the most turbulent weeks in Financial Services history. Bankers read daily headlines like:

Lehman Brother’s with $60B in bad loans says it will file for Chapter 11 after all rescue attempts fail.
Bank of America announces it will acquire troubled Merrill Lynch in a $50 billion all-stock transaction
U.S. government agrees to provide an $85-billion emergency loan to rescue the huge insurer AIG, taking an almost 80% stake in the company
Regulators ban short selling of Financial Services stocks for 10-day in order to slow the market drop.
Treasury Secretary announces a plan to relieve banks of their troubled loan portfolios in an attempt to revive the financial markets
Many senior executives from the top global firms arrived in Vienna only to immediately catch a plane heading home back to “deal with the issues”.

During the week many journalist seriously debated whether the US financial services industry could survive. Given this environment, I expected banking professionals to be in shock and the level of interest in making deals and building solutions to wane. However, in sharp contrast to the pessimism of the media, in the many conversations I held with senior bankers at SIBOS, they were optimistic or at the very least hopeful.

There seemed to be consensus that while the financial services industry has some very tough times ahead, the banks that survive will have to be stronger, more cost efficient, more customer-oriented, and have an infrastructure better equipped to deal with ever the future brings. Numerous banks were actually looking at this as an opportunity - a time for significant investment. At this point, bankers are still looking at IT to help make them more functionality rich, cost competitive and secure in the future. Whether or not this optimism can endure given the market turbulence of last few weeks, we’ll have to wait and see.

I actually had a banker say to me with a wink in his eye, “this is a great time to spend, another few million dollars off the bottom line won’t be missed!”.

- John Hunter, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Adobe Systems Inc.

Posted by at 11:10 AM | Permalink