Driving Revenue Through Collaboration
Financial Services Firms Prepre for Market Upswing
The time is right for collaboration tools to help financial services firms address their next focus—increasing productivity and revenues. Now that a lot of the heavy lifting has been done to bring data and trade processing systems to a new level, senior management can now turn to something more familiar, but elusive—business processes that generate revenue.
Whether creating the pitch book for an investment-banking prospect or coordinating cross-selling efforts for a new borrower, “producers” are involved in daily collaborative activities that drive the top-line success of financial-services firms. The business development or “front end” of financial services has always been the competitive battleground that determines the winners and the losers, the “leadership” companies and the laggards. The shift from cost-cutting to “top-line growth” will:
- Challenge sales organizations: As the business climate improves, firms will find it more difficult to manage a growing pipeline with their slimmed-down staff
- Force productivity gains: Management will not rush out to build excess sales capacity to capture new business, relying instead on increasing productivity from existing human resources
- Drive improved collaboration: As business heats up again, firms will strive for superior teamwork to pursue more opportunities with higher quality efforts and better management oversight.
These conditions demand collaboration solutions that leverage existing capabilities and improve effectiveness and productivity. According to Julio Gomez, financial-services industry expert, productivity and revenue will be a key focus in the coming year for financial-services leaders. Firms that will come out ahead will be those that adopt new technologies to get there.
These innovative solutions ideally can be overlaid on existing processes and are compatible with established behaviors. They must be quick to implement and maintain, easy to use and cost-effective.
Enter “Collaborative E-mail”
Kubi Software coined the term “Collaborative E-mail” to describe its solution: bringing collaboration capabilities to the e-mail interface, where executives already “live,” instead of forcing adoption of a new, separate software application. This is tailor-made for the ad-hoc, ever-evolving nature of financial-services collaboration because:
- Most collaboration has migrated to e-mail: Proposal development, product development, client management... any function that requires collaboration between line-of-business professionals has gravitated to e-mail to facilitate communication
- The e-mail beast must be tamed: The productivity drain resulting from waves of disorganized electronic messages threatens the value of e-mail. Collaborative E-mail is embedded in e-mail, but separates the vital, project-related and revenue-producing communications and documents from the flood of irrelevant communications
- Managers can use help: Management’s role beyond enforcing accountability is to help improve the team’s performance. E-mail tracks activities, but is unwieldy for auditing team effectiveness. Collaborative E-mail organizes all of the messages and documents associated with a specific project and maintains a complete history. Managers can review the dynamics and data to evaluate the process and model best practices. This is impossible with e-mail alone
- New technology investments must leverage existing infrastructure: According to IDC, “Email is where 90-95% of all collaboration occurs.”1 In particular, the Microsoft Outlook and IBM Lotus Notes Email clients share 90 percent of the worldwide corporate-Email market.2 Kubi’s technology works as an extension to these clients, bringing collaborative capabilities to the familiar e-mail interface and allowing complete collaboration between users of these systems.
“It’s like putting reading glasses on the blur of e-mail and only having the relevant, project-related items come into focus. Financial-services agencies should take a hard look at Collaborative E-mail to optimize the constrained resources they have in what looks like an upswing in the market,” states Gomez.
Founder and CEO Julio Estrada has extensive experience in developing commercially successful software, including chief architect roles for Lotus QuickPlace and Lotus Domino Web Server;collaboration solutions used today by tens of millions of users. Estrada is the principal inventor of over a dozen highly significant patents in the area of Web-based collaboration.
Julio Gomez is a widely recognized expert on the impact of technology on Financial Services. Frequently quoted in the press, he was named by Time Magazine as one of the 50 most important people shaping technology. Gomez previously founded Gomez, Inc., the Internet Customer Experience Measurement firm (formerly Gomez Advisors).
Kubi Software was founded in 2001 to create a new class of business software called Collaborative E-mail, which combines the power of collaboration with the familiarity and ease-of-use of e-mail.
1 Collaborative Email—Lowering the Barriers to Successful Collaboration, Mark Levitt and Robert P. Mahowald, IDC, May 2003.
2 The Market for Messaging Management Products, 2001-2006, Ferris Research, September 2001.
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