Fighting to stay in 1st…
I attended the 1st – The Exchange User Conference on the 25th May – not having attended before, the event was a very pleasant surprise. It was well organised, packed with useful exhibits and well attended – so providing a great networking opportunity. From my perspective, it was much better than the MoneyMarketing or Mortgage Expo conferences that I have been to in the recent past. There are few software companies in the Financial service industry that could have pulled off such an event and hats off to 1st – The Exchange for doing such a great job.
1st – The Exchange used the conference to trail a number of interesting developments. The one that gained the most interest was their ‘Client Portal’ and it is an important development for a company that has largely delivered offline technology solutions in the past. The Client Portal quite simply gives the end client a view of the data the IFA holds. It also enables the client to make changes to that data albeit that these changes, for data integrity reasons, aren’t accepted into Adviser Office until approved by the adviser. Client Portal also shows a view of the Portfolio, enabling automated valuations to be requested. Finally, it allows for a secure document store and a protected method of communication between adviser and client.
1st – The Exchange has built the system with mobile devices in mind and demonstrated this with both the iPhone and the Blackberry. Client Portal is a significant development and a positive step forward with a more modern web look and feel when compared to Adviser Office. There is a breed of more modern tools that are being used to engage the end consumer in a number of ways and another good example of such a tool from Sammedia which has a very engaging ‘Apple’ look and feel to it, called MoneyInfo was also on show at the conference.
In addition to the Client Portal, 1st – The Exchange was also showing of its new financial planning tools to the market. Again, what they have built, is an impressive step forward over some of the older, but still widely used Product solutions. Financial planning tools tightly integrated to the back-office makes a lot of sense and my only disappointment with the tools that were on show is that they are probably still six months from general release.
1st –The Exchange is the largest ‘quote and apply’ portal and is still the largest back-office system in the market. As market leader, they are often picked on as the firm people love to hate. However, the value that they provide to the industry has been and still is, immense. The company has a broad set of product functionality and the financial backing to push its strategy forward. It spends more on R&D than some of the smaller companies’ annual turnover. As with all suppliers, clients and consultants like ourselves often want more to be delivered from them sooner and for everything to work as a joined up story. However, we mustn’t lose sight that ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’ and maintaining existing functionality, renewing it in new solutions and adding innovative ideas for the future is a significant challenge, but is one that the Company would appear to be working towards delivering.
Written by Mark Loosmore - Visit Website