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

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

Don’t Let Paperwork Pollute Your Profits
Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 2 p.m. EST

Automating paper-intensive processes can reduce application errors, save time, and improve the quality of your customer service. Attend this free online seminar to hear from Dickinson Financial as they discuss how they have saved millions annually and realized 1,408% ROI over three years using Adobe solutions.

Register Now

Secure Electronic Communications and Drive Efficient Online Transactions
Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 2 p.m. EST

Financial institutions are increasingly recognizing the importance of secure electronic communications. Providing more effective and more secure interactions with customers, agents, and brokers can be the critical differentiator to attracting and retaining customers. Attend this free online seminar to hear from David Hamermesh, research director at TowerGroup who will present his findings on the value that appropriate security can create.

Register Now

Posted by at 10:55 AM | Permalink

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Adobe’s Financial Services Industry Blog! We have decided to launch this blog to share with our customers, partners and employees our observations on issues important to the FSI sector worldwide. One of the advantages a company like Adobe has is that we work with hundreds of financial services firms of all sizes and in all segments around the world many of these firms amongst the most influential, innovative and forward-thinking in the industry. We like to think that this provides us a broad perspective on the industry and happenings and trends and we hope these will be of interest and value to our readers and that our readers will actively participate in this blog.

Launching our blog at this point in time has certainly provided a wealth of potential material given the unprecedented activity in the financial services industries over the past several weeks. In situations such as this it is always tempting to try to look back at the circumstances and events that have led to the current crisis, apportion blame and pontificate on the best ways to resolve the current crisis. Instead I’d like to take a different tack and speculate about what the US financial system will look like a few years down the road as a result of today’s events.

First, the US Banking system will likely look a lot more like those of the UK, Canada or Australia and will be characterized by a very small number (3 to 5) very large institutions along with a few mid-tier institutions and somewhat larger number of community level and specialty banks. This model has proliferated in all of the Commonwealth countries and many other markets in Europe and Asia/Pacific based on the need to fund organic growth through core deposits and the vast leverage a large national presence provides. In this vein the current flurry of brokered mergers and acquisitions may be seen as just the first round in a new, longer term wave of consolidation.

Second, the remaining few “Mega-Banks” will operate much more closely aligned to the European Universal banking model with institutions competing in all of the banking, capital markets and insurance segments of the industry. We have already seen the all-but-demise of the investment banking segment in the US with both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley converting to commercial bank charters and one can easily see some number of the large multi-line carriers in the US becoming attractive acquisition targets over the next several years.

This will have significant impact on the structure and function of the regulatory and government/quasi-government participants in the financial system.

First, one has to question the need for the complex web of agencies and organizations involved in the US residential mortgage market. Between Treasury, HUD, FHA, the Fed, the Mae’s and the FHLB’s it is no wonder that supervision and operation of this market has broken down. One could speculate that in 2010 a single executive agency could be in place to direct market strategy with full oversight exercised by the Fed and a single secondary market support system which could be a vastly more efficient structure.

Second, the fundamental nature of the regulatory infrastructure can be expected to change over the next few years. Fundamentally, the regulatory philosophy in the US has been protectionist in nature – protecting one segment of the industry from another, protecting consumers from predatory practices and protecting US firms from foreign competition. One can speculate that this focus created the complex web of, in some cases, contradictory regulations that, it can be argued, helped fuel the current crisis will be replaced with a regulatory infrastructure based on a philosophy of internal governance and operational prudence. In such a model regulation will be less about “Thou shall not” and more about the processes and procedures to mitigate operational, reputational, privacy, security and market risks. At the same time one can see that the potential exists for a standardization of regulation across national boundaries with key initiatives like Sarbanes Oxley, MIFID, and SEPA unifying the FSI sectors in different countries.

Whatever the outcome it is clear that we have reached a watershed in the evolution of the financial system in this country and, being a “glass half full” bunch we believe the current crisis represents a unique opportunity for the system to evolve to a much more efficient and more competitive form.

Cheers. And see you at the pub!

Posted by at 7:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)