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Taking the initiative: A window of opportunity to design brilliant mobile wealth management experiences.

Filed under Mobile by Justin Mercer on July 22, 2012
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So like the majority of people I have both my personal email and my work email linked to my phone. Like many others I dabble in the share market from time to time (read: probably 5 purchases/sells per year).

It will come as no surprise then that working in the mobile space and having an existing portfolio means I take an interest in the stock market apps out there.

I recently purchased StockTouch, which offers an array of ways to visually display different equities, sectors and how they are performing. Having spent a few minutes playing around with this new app it was somewhat unfortunate that my existing wealth management advisor happened to send through his fortnightly market update – an email with a PDF attachment. The difference in experiences could not have been more profound. One gives me access to the near real-time performance of USA and Global equities in an easily digestible interactive format (with links to market intel reports) the other is a PDF version of the same hardcopy market update report they have been churning out for years.

In my opinion, the opportunity and the need for financial planners/wealth management advisors to embrace a design-led approach to mobile is obvious. The larger banks are already leading the charge in personalising and enriching the mobile experiences they offer. Kiwibank provides all information from a single ‘personal teller’ aka John, searching for a branch via the St George app provides you with a photo of the local branch manager and their details.

It’s not hard to imagine the next step will be a convergence of retail and personal investment experiences, where you can open a trading account that is linked to your checking account from within the one application. Think a hybrid of CBA’s Commbank and Commsec apps.

However as mentioned before, the relationships financial planners/wealth management advisors hold with their clients cannot be underestimated. There is a real opportunity for specialist investment firms to leverage this relationship in a mobile environment. Tailored market research in an easily digestible format coupled with timely push notifications from a trusted advisor you’ve stayed with through good times and bad is an extremely strong value proposition.

The opportunity to take the lead is closing fast though, it won’t be long until the big four turn their attention to their respective investment arms and apply their learnings from delivering great retail experiences.

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JOOB delivers nonstop access for ClearView Wealth

Filed under Uncategorized by Ben Hanna on July 15, 2012
CV Interview
[ClearView Wealth Managing Director Simon Swanson talked to The Australian IT’s Jennifer Foreshew about solutions JOOB developed for the company]

In Tuesday 19 June’s edition of The Australian newspaper’s IT section, one of our customer case studies was featured as the lead story. I wanted to highlight this for a few reasons. First of all it’s a big step for us as an organisation to be featured in Australia’s national newspaper, in what is arguably the country’s leading IT and technology publication, so in terms of bringing awareness to the JOOB brand in Australia, it’s a major coup. Secondly, I think the article clearly captures the work that JOOB has undertaken for ClearView Wealth Limited, and the benefits the business has seen since implementing our products and solutions.

When we first started working with ClearView, we identified that the challenge the company was facing was its internal legacy and separate systems, as well as accounting for the multiple devices, web and mobile systems its advisers and clients use to connect. In November 2011, we announced the launch of ClearView’s investment portal and iPhone application, which aimed to enhance the user experience for ClearView’s life insurance and wealth management clients and advisers to give them secure access to valuable information, regardless of the time or their location.

Fast forward to June 2012, and it’s safe to say that ClearView has experienced a number of business benefits and gained a competitive advantage in its quest to become a fully integrated life insurance and wealth management company that can compete against larger wealth managers.

Jennifer Foreshew’s article demonstrates really well how ClearView’s client investment portal provides its investment clients with secure access to their account information, transaction history and contact details online and via an iPhone application. We designed and built it using the JOOB Mobile Platform, and the portal is accessed via the ClearView website. By integrating mobile features with ClearView’s existing services and platforms, it is now easier for ClearView’s clients to access valuable information regardless of the time or their location.

In addition, we have also been working with ClearView to implement an adviser portal. This portal provides ClearView’s financial planners and independent financial advisers (IFAs) with the ability to quote and complete life insurance sales in an easy and efficient manner, over the web.

Thanks to ClearView Wealth managing director Simon Swanson for his efforts in this article. Here’s to the next one!

Read the full article here

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Engaging Tomorrow’s Generation, Brings Benefits Today – the multiple opportunities mobile offers Financial Services.

Filed under Mobile Uncategorized by Justin Mercer on May 28, 2012
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Speaking to the owner of a boutique Sydney wealth management company recently I asked him what his greatest challenge was for the business. His response “engaging with my clients’ children”. Until recently I didn’t appreciate the colossal transfer of wealth that will occur in Australia over the next 15 years ($400b according to a 2010 Bankwest report). This owner-operator, like many wealth management firms, had built his company on reputation and relationships. The right school, the right network, combined with a proven track record. But why should his $10m dollar net-worth clients children choose to invest their inheritance with him instead of the private wealth division of the bank they have used since their first pocket money deposit?

Mobile as a channel not only provides an opportunity to engage with this next generation, but reengage with time poor executives that are bombarded with ‘weekly newsletters’. A recent Google “Our Mobile Planet: Australia” survey showed that 83% of people use their smartphones to communicate (emails/networking sites) and 49% to stay informed (read newspapers, information portals). Interestingly, 22% of interviewees were 45+ years old.

The early movers are already using mobile devices to assist advisors to engage with prospective clients. Philadelphia-based Brinker Capital launched it’s Absolute Return Mixer in April 2012, a well-designed and simple app tool that assists advisors to shape the conversation with new clients. It is also a way of hooking in new clients, by forcing them to register through their website if they want to see their AR Mixer results. San Francisco-based Personal Capital, a new venture by former PayPal CEO Bill Harris, has taken a different approach launching a highly transactional app that blurs the lines between tradition banking apps (think: expense tracking, fund transfers) with wealth management bread and butter (think: market insights, portfolio tracking). The strategy; a large number of consumers who download the Personal Capital app for expense tracking, fund transfers, mum/dad-type investing will then turn to one of their financial advisor when their wealth grows and expertise/management assistance is sought.

Closer to home, the insurance and banking industries have embraced this trend. MLC, St George, TAL are examples of significant industry players that have all launched internally focused apps to assist their salesforce in the field. After all, do you think your client is more likely to notice a push notification providing market insight while in a taxi checking their portfolio balance from your app or pick out an email newsletter amongst the other 300 sitting in their inbox?

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Financial Services Innovation Breakfast, Competing on Customer Experience.

Filed under Mobile by Craig Richardson on May 13, 2012

We recently held the JOOB Financial Services Innovation Seminar in Sydney with the purpose of starting a dialogue for the changing needs of our customers in the financial services industry. Discussions at the event revolved around a common theme: the industry can no longer afford to compete with their competitors on products and price alone – they need to compete on customer experience, namely through new channels like smartphones and tablets.

The room was abuzz with company executives from across many of Australia’s top banks and financial services companies who are in various stages of enhancing the mobile experience for their customers.

Some well-known experts in the financial services industry presented to attendees, one such expert was Andrew Murrell, General Manager of Digital and Social Marketing at Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), the country’s largest bank.

Andrew offered some fantastic insights and in-depth analysis of how banks can use technology like smartphones and tablets to enhance the customer experience, giving examples of a couple of CBA’s mobile banking applications, including its revolutionary Kaching app.

Andrew also talked about how Australian consumers have changed, and that banks can no longer afford to rely solely on their internet banking websites to engage with customers – they must make the customer banking experience mobile, and interact with customers through mobile devices.

In addition, we also heard from Australian JOOB customer and ClearView Wealth Limited Managing Director, Simon Swanson. Simon spoke about why customer experience matters for financial services companies, particularly for a challenger brand in the wealth management and insurance industry like ClearView. One such way ClearView aims to distinguish itself from the competition and challenge bigger brands is to be a leader in experience – for customers, staff and partners – at anywhere, anytime, through a fully integrated customer experience platform.

In order to do this, the company had to tackle the problem of its legacy systems, separate systems, and of course, multiple devices its staff, partners and customers use to connect. Simon detailed how the company has managed to overcome these problems by implementing an integration layer to its systems, powered by JOOB. The integration layer now allows ClearView’s customers, partners and staff to now seamlessly access its Adviser and Wealth Portals, from any device, anywhere, anytime.

“It really hammered home just how much consumer behaviour is changing, and that financial services companies cannot afford to get left behind. It is now imperative that firms have a road map for the future, for modern, mobile financial services customer experiences.”

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Craig Richardson MD on BYOD – Sky News Australia

Filed under Uncategorized by Daniel Clouston on March 14, 2012

JOOB’s Managing Director Craig Richardson was interviewed on Sky News’ Technology Behind Business show yesterday about BYOD and how mobile is transforming the way companies conduct business.

Craig Richardson on Sky News

Click here to watch the video on the Sky News Australia website.

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By 2015 Microsoft Mobile will surpass iOS – really??

Filed under Mobile by Herman Rooseboom on February 15, 2012

A few months ago I was looking at the device sales forecasts by operating systems from Gartner and Forrester and both showed a very strong growth for Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system. It seemed wildly optimistic – both reports suggested that Microsoft would catch up to Apple and surpass it by 2015.

Then came the release of the Nokia Lumina handsets running Mango and the first previews of Windows 8 on a tablet with the same Metro interface. According to someone (probably an MS employee) on Wikipedia this tile interface is based on Swiss graphic design which means nothing to me but all the same, interesting.

What really struck me when I had the opportunity to play with a Windows 8 tablet recently was that this was the solution to the enterprise mobility challenge. iOS is a fantastic operating system, it doesn’t crash, it is simple to use and is beautiful stylistically. At the same time though it presents a number of challenges for an enterprise user, primarily the fact that spreadsheets are impossible to use on an iPad. People who are on the go and deal with customers use a lot of spreadsheets so they inevitably end up using an iPad and a laptop so their bag just keeps getting heavier.

Windows 8 devices will support a mouse, keyboard and other accessories when docked via Bluetooth or USB and then when you take the tablet out of the docking station it becomes a fully functional tablet. I suspect that the soon to be announced version of Office will have a new approach to Excel to support the touch gestures – if not, it would be a huge failing in the application. The tablet devices are probably going to run on ARM CPU’s so you won’t be able to use your legacy desktop applications – but why would you want to if you can use contextual applications based on the Metro interface?

JOOB has been working on a number of projects where the application on the phone or tablet becomes the sum of a number of back end systems that are collated into a user friendly, contextual application. So instead of multi-tasking between several applications while talking to a customer, you simply open a single application and let the JOOB framework do the interface to the various systems. The end result is an application that requires virtually no user training yet delivers the business requirements for that particular person anywhere, any time.

So expect to see a lot of Microsoft on mobiles in the next year as users and IT teams discover the power of mobility using the new Microsoft Metro interface whether on a Nokia smartphone or a tablet or a desktop. I think Gartner and Forrester hit the nail on the head.

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JOOB Mobile 2.5 available now

Filed under Mobile by Dale Anderson on January 16, 2012

Posted via JOOB Mobile developer Dale Anderson’s blog Swishys Ramblings

After a rather pressed end to 2011 the new year has started well, we just dropped version 2.5 of JOOB Mobile.

Just a quick overview of the top 12 enhancements contained within the release:

Multiple Application Support

This adds the ability to manage multiple JOOB Mobile applications from one instance of the control panel, this is the initial step to a full multi-tenanted environment going forward.

Searching

In this release we add the capability to do searching in a RESTful manner in a simple, scalable and standardized way. Tyler has written an introduction to the new classes and functionality on the JOOB Mobile site here: RESTful searching with JOOB Mobile

Support for iOS5.1/Android 4/WP7 Mango

JOOB Mobile has been tested against iOS 5.1 betas, Android 4 ( Ice Cream Sandwich ) and Windows Phone 7 ‘Mango’ , Server side has been tested against 64bit Windows releases from Vista through to Windows 8 Developer preview so you can be sure your applications will work with current devices going forward.

Roles

This release contains finer grained Roles by default to allow better control of access out of the box without resorting to implementing your own access control plugin.

Test Client Framework

We have now shipped a test client framework within the product to make it easier to implement integration tests within JOOB Mobile applications.

Priority Queues on Clients including TTL

Calls within the framework now allow the ability to pass in a Time To Live and priority, this was after feedback from developers wanting a way to immediately fail and return in certain cases, you can now for example allow a GET to jump the queue and only attempt the request once for time critical requests.

New callback mechanism iOS

The iOS client library now allows the developer to pass in a target object and selector to be invoked on success and failure to allow better flow and easier development within your iOS applications.

Control Panel redesign

The control panel has had a make over to freshen up the UI and improve the user experience.

In-memory requests on clients

You can now define whether you wish requests through our API to be persistent or not, previously ALL requests where persisted regardless to provide reliable delivery, you can now request operations to be non persistent where for example you may be dealing with sensitive data you do not wish to be stored on the device.

Javascript support for multiple apps on same domain

The Javascript client now handles multiple JOOB Mobile applications being deployed within the same domain.

Server Module in control Panel (log monitoring, heartbeat etc…)

We now have a server module to provide statistics and monitoring capabilities of the JOOB Mobile instance host.

Appcelerator Module

This JOOB Mobile version contains the first release of an Appcelerator module ( currently only supporting iOS ) with the code base being opensourced and hosted on GitHub

As usual any issues can be logged on our issue tracking system or you can email us directly , feel free also to drop past our IRC channel on freenode #joobmobile or DM me on twitter @swishyTM.

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The One Chart You Need To See To Understand Mobile

Filed under Mobile by Contributing Blogger on November 9, 2011

ComScore has data out on the US phone market and Asymco breaks them down, including this great chart below on the evolution of the US phone platform install base.

It highlights a few key points, some of which are already known, but some of which don’t get talked about enough:

  • The Blue Ocean is still HUGE. For all that we (justifiably, more on which below) talk about who among Apple, Google, RIM, Microsoft et al. is winning in smartphones, the biggest opportunity remains the Blue Ocean of getting smartphones in the hands of non-smartphone users. (This is true of the US, but also very true of developing markets where the shift to mobile is enormous.)
  • In turn, this means the game is far from over. Given that most of the market is still a blue ocean, the opportunity for newcomers is great. Particularly for platforms with lots of resources and distribution, i.e. the Microsoft-Nokia duo.
  • Holy cow, Android! With all these caveats out of the way—the other thing that jumps out is how big and how fast growing Android is. Google’s open-source, broad distribution strategy is textbook disruptive innovation, and at least so far, seems to be working just like it should: i.e., it is eating the market.
  • Yes, Apple should be worried; but no, it’s not over, far from it. First of all, Apple is huge and still growing very nicely. Second of all, because the mobile wars are platform wars, smartphone marketshare undercounts iOS marketshare because of the enormous successes of the iPad and iPod Touch, which aren’t phones but are still mobile iOS devices. And thirdly, this chart doesn’t count the two big potential gamechangers Apple has recently introduced: the iPhone 4S, which looks like an excellent device and could be a record-breaking seller; and, less flashy but at least as important, the FREE iPhone 3GS, which allows Apple to have an offering for the bottom of the market and be competitive with Android. How these devices perform could make things look very different three months from now.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-one-chart-you-need-to-see-to-understand-mobile-2011-11#ixzz1dFkI0RQv

Actos

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Mobile security: Security Grinches’ misleading scare tactics

Filed under Mobile by Contributing Blogger on November 7, 2011

Ah, the period between Halloween and Christmas, when security vendors try to scare you by turning technology joy into fear – and threaten your very business

Are security fears becoming a corporate liability? Galen Gruman from InfoWorld believes so, check out his article here

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Employees refusing to use clunky enterprise software

Filed under Mobile by Contributing Blogger on November 2, 2011

Today’s tech-savvy workers won’t use IT’s desk-bound enterprise applications. They want mobile access to corporate data via intuitive interfaces. Read the full article here

Published in Computer World by Adam Hartung

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