Next Generation Online Channel Reporting for Banking and Investment Firms

Over the past decade new technology, global economics, and regulatory tightening have put pressure on the financial services industry to evolve how it approaches customers. Change is occurring across the spectrum of segments-from retail consumers to commercial customers, from private clients to institutions,

Yet satisfaction levels have not kept pace, which means financial institutions have put themselves at risk of losing customers. According to Keane Research, when compared with other industries financial services ranked just below average in the second quarter of 2006 Online Customer Respect Study, a drop from six months earlier.

Product, channel, and operational silos are largely to blame. Information, transactions, and service are often managed by distinct and separate systems and technologies. This challenge is compounded by the multitude of products institutions offer today. The customer experience suffers. Clients often find themselves faced with a multitude of online account logins and no single view of their holdings. Customers often get bounced from service rep to service rep when trying to navigate the call center and commercial clients still straddle PC and Web systems for various aspects of their accounts and services.

Firms must embrace and accelerate the shift from an operationalcentric approach to a customer-centric approach if they hope to achieve organic growth using flexible services and component-based technologies and architectures that blend with and leverage the existing infrastructure.

Achieving Organic Growth by Improving Customer Interactions

Growth was a more straightforward proposition during the M&A boom, with institutions acquiring entire customer bases with a signature and a handshake. Now, in an era when organic growth is the strategy gaining favor in the boardroom, financial institutions must focus on customer centricity, attracting new customers, and more important, keeping and growing relationships with existing customers.

This means understanding how customers have evolved beyond where they were 10 years ago. It means knowing how customersboth individual consumers and commercial businesses-want to interact with the firm. It means leveraging new services-oriented technologies to bridge the inefficiency gaps created by decades of silo-oriented processes compounded by years of mergers and acquisitions. It means mastering how delivery channels work together to fulfill new demands; how Web self-service complements the call center, branch, agent, or broker; and how critical it has become for customers to have access to real-time information and control across all of their financial services.

The Rise of the Sophisticated Internet Customer

There has been a dramatic increase in the level of Internet usage for financial services. Consumer Internet usage has seen average double-digit growth in the past three years alone, while the corporate banking market continues its push to retire legacy cash and treasury management systems in favor of online cash management. Banks will spend approximately USD600 million this year on the deployment of new and replacement browser-based cash management solutions, according to HighQuest. It's not the online consumer, brokerage, agent, or corporate banking experience that is setting the bar for customer expectations, it's the pervasive, personalized, and powerful experience users are having with the cutting edge Web sites and tools driving the Internet forward-from megasites like Google, Yahool eBay, and Amazon to day-to-day productivity resources like airline Web sites, Orbitz, and FedEx.com.

Customers expect no less from their bank, broker, or insurer. Whether they are managing their own savings and retirement accounts, or overseeing investment strategies for a multibillion-dollar organization, customers now expect to able to access any information, in any format, at any time. They expect dynamic content, personalization, and immediate response. They want more control over their accounts. They want to choose how they receive account information, and they expect 24x7 access.

To maintain satisfaction and stay competitive, organizations must continue to make online interactions and service a better, more convenient experience for their customers.

Making Financial Services Tangible

Financial services has a high-touch relationship with customers, due to its nature-access to and management of money. Consumers, corporations, agents, and brokers are all keenly interested in the state of their relationship with the provider, more so than in most industries.

It's critical for institutions not to take this for granted and to strive to provide customers more visibility into services being provided.

Customers care about their money. They want to see it grow. They want to understand how to make it grow. They want to analyze how it is being spent and how best to spend it.

Firms can provide customers more tangible value by delivering customers complete insight into their accounts with next generation online reporting and analysis tools.

Investment Management

Today's investors have the freedom to switch investment managers with relative ease, causing intense competition for their business, and increasing the cost of attracting new clients. As a result, investment houses are keenly focused on retaining and growing existing accounts, causing them to reevaluate and improve the online information services they deliver to their clients. At the same time, companies must improve the productivity of their investment advisors by giving them the online tools and data they need to serve more clients more effectively.

Today's financial services firms compete fiercely for their share of high-net worth investors, including the emerging ranks of wealthy baby boomers and young professionals. To grow and prosper, the firms must meet the needs of these demanding investors with superior online information and personalized services.

For years, investment houses have offered online portals that provide clients with basic access to statements, transaction and history reports, and portfolio performance summaries. But as younger, busier, and savvier investors join the investment community in ever-increasing numbers, financial services firms must review the adequacy of their online reporting and analysis tools.

To be a leader in the online financial services world, firms must anticipate client demands and deliver powerful products and services that deliver value to the investors every day. To do so, firms must upgrade the accessibility, quality, timeliness, personalization, interactive analysis, and security of their online client portals.

To give the new generation of sophisticated investors the visibility into their investments they demand, financial services firms must deliver a variety of report types:

* Multiaccount performance dashboards

* A choice of portfolio and trade history reports

* Current and historical tax reports

* Performance reports benchmarked against personalized investment and life goals

In addition to more report types, investors are asking for more functionality including:

* Instant access to real-time account status

* A choice of how and when reports are delivered

* Customizable reports with user-specified settings

* Control over the look and feel of displayed data

* Ability to download information into a variety of formats and tools for further analysis

* Access to account for information, as well as market data and analysis, in a convenient, unified, real-time view

Wealth Management

Actuate has a variety of successful client reporting customers. One wealth management division of a top 10 global bank reproduced high-quality statements that previously could only be produced manually, while generating the incredibly faster. A private banking division of a top 10 global bank streamlined the entire customer-facing process with easy-to-interpret and highly interactive investmentanalysis views. And, a private banking division inside a top five global bank upgraded from static to interactive portfolio statements that are more efficient and greatly improve client satisfaction.

Wealth management portfolio dashboards include multiaccount aggregations; brochure-quality formatting and delivery; print-ready documents; and client and advisor customization tools for what-if, presentation and layout, criteria selection, and other modifications.

Asset Management

Several leading asset managers have been able to gain substantial improvements, thanks to Actuate. Deutsche Institutional Asset Management dramatically accelerated production of client portfolio reporting with no quality compromise, tailored and personalized reports, and greatly improved overall style and consistency across reports. "With the Actuate solution we will be able to incorporate [text and images] within the report far more swiftly, and so really accelerate the process. Actuate allowed us to implement the reporting strategy we wanted," says Steve Needham, vice president of IT for client reporting at Deutsche Asset Management.

Legg Mason gave investment managers real-time information that raised their efficiency, giving them more time to deliver advice and qualitative value to their clients. 'We just recently supplied the Actuate reports to someone with non-Legg Mason assets. They saw the reports and had to have them. As a result, the broker brought in another $4 million in assets," says Lisa Haynes, director of operations at Legg Mason.

The Relationship Manager Tools provide advisor customization tools for what-if, presentation and layout, criteria selection, and other modifications; ad-hoc report creation and grouping; and secure client delivery.

Banking

Online services are among the fiercest battlegrounds in today's banking industry as customers become more sophisticated users of the online channel. Banks of all sizes must continually enhance their online channel to retain their competitive edge and their customers. The next wave of online services brings new value to traditional online reporting by adding next-generation capabilities to:

* Account statements and management

* Cash management information reporting

* Investment performance analysis

* Credit card statements, payment, and analysis

* Consumer and commercial loan reports

* Employee benefit statements and analysis

* and many more services every day

By presenting all of a customer's information across all accounts and banking relationships in a single, easily accessed place, online services redefine the way customers interact with the institution.

As both retail and corporate customers become more Web savvy, they expect online services to be more personalized and powerfuland they are taking their business to banks that understand how to make their lives easier.

It's not enough to offer monthly online statements and daily account summaries anymore. Today's users expect a lot more, including:

* Multiple deposit accounts graphically presented in a unified view

* Interactive graphics that they can manipulate

* Customizable cash flow reports for budget management

* Real-time statements and account summaries with up-to-the-moment timeliness and accuracy

* Searchable transaction histories that download into personal accounting applications

* Drill-down reports that show the details and documents behind the numbers

* Spreadsheet reports that they can analyze and modify in Excel

* Reports that they can customize with a few clicks and save the results

* A choice of delivery methods including Web, email, fax, text messaging, and hard copy

Retail Banking Solutions

The online channel was once heralded as the panacea for retail banking, while spelling the demise of branches and call canters. While this has not happened, the online channel has delivered massive savings and efficiencies to banks and customers alike and continues to alter the mix of product and service delivery by various channels. Smart banks are leveraging the online channel alongside branches, ATMs, and call centers within the context of the entire customer experience.

In doing so the world's top banks, as well as nimble regional banks seeking a competitive advantage, have discovered that the market for Internet banking, specifically the readiness of the banking population, is now approaching some of the promise from 10 years ago.

These banks have renewed initiatives to add value to the customer experience through the online channel to improve satisfaction levels, and more important, grow wallet share.

Corporate Banking and Card Service Solutions

The corporate banking market for cash management and card service solutions continues to grow. TowerGroup predicts continued doubledigit growth in spending for online cash-management solutions worldwide as banks continue to wean corporate customers off legacy client/server systems and onto a modern Web infrastructure.

In the business banking world account reporting must be ready to support the millions of banking and credit transactions, large money transfers, payments, dispute resolutions across hundreds of regional locations, currencies, and languages worldwide. In short, interactions with corporate customers are much more complex and involved than with retail consumers.

While standardizing and modernizing infrastructure is a key driver for banks, many successful corporate banking divisions have learned that their client base has become more Web-sawy over the years and operational financial systems have changed as well. This has resulted in new product road maps to add sophisticated Web-based account reporting and analysis tools and new delivering methods using service-oriented architecture and Web services to evolve with clients' financial systems.

Card Service Solutions

GLOBAL 5 BANK ONLINE RETAIL MERCHANT SERVICES

* Online card services channel delivers Web-based Actuate reports that help manage over 60 merchant partners' credit card operations including:

* Transactional summary and detail

* Volume and amount

* Currencies

* Billing

* Fraud

* Merchant partners can answer their own questions on line without calling their sales representative or the merchant operations desk

* Call volume has decreased by 50 percent while merchant partner satisfaction has increased dramatically

LEADING GLOBAL CARD PROVIDER

* Web-based tool gives member banks, merchants and customer support representatives at member banks real-time access to transaction data through secure browser screens or private network

* Greatly reduces costs of resolving dispute payments for both card provider and merchant banks

* Expect to save as much as $1 billion over the next five years

* Financial and cash flow gains via the expedited collection of payment disputes