Financial Matters

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