Staging the Digital Experience – 10 Functional Steps for the New Paradigm Michael Smith Fulfillment, Function and Form are important elements in understanding what InvestCloud is about. Last week, InvestCloud’s CEO, John Wise discussed Fulfillment, and how it is the critical foundation of data provisioning and integration This week, I will be focusing on Function, unpacking what we believe that means for the delivery of financial services. At InvestCloud’s User Conference, I led a session on Digital Experience. Function is the best filter for addressing methods to staging your firm’s adoption of digital communications. From the dawn of civilization approximately five thousand years ago, most of our communication was either face-to-face or in some written form. The evolution from the first written document to the printing press took over 1000 years, and from the printing press to the laser printer, it took about 500 years. Approximately 20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee added World Wide Web to the academic Internet. Against the revolution in communications that has occurred since, all of those previous changes were just slow multi-generational evolutions. There was plenty of time to digest them and consider the changes. However, it is not the same with our digital revolution. In this short span of 20 years, we have gone from rudimentary desk-bound web sites to nearly universal wireless connectivity with engagingly graphical tablet applets, phones that can price compare products, to watches that take our pulse remind us of our appointments and tell us if our stocks are up or down. What degree has your firm engaged with this digital revolution? This is a key question for companies to find out what they are lacking and what they need to improve on. Is your company still living with a document-only paradigm where their version of digital experience is periodic PDFs sent as email attachments? Or has your company moved into the more competitive position of delivering interactive and integrated data-driven reporting? One of the fundamental problems for making this transition has to do with how most application software is built. Even though most vendors have some sort of web front-end on their applications now, those applications are still hardcoded, and difficult to either integrate or customize. With InvestCloud’s proprietary technology, we are able to build a platform that can be customized by business analysts. As our program does not require programmers or hardcoding, we named it Programs Writing Programs(PWPTM). Within less than five years, InvestCloud has built over 150 functional applets, with more than 4000 custom screen views of those applets for our clients. The reason why this is possible is because PWPTM allows business analysts to do within days what would take a team of programmers several months or years to do due to hard coding. As a
result, InvestCloud has made it both practical and affordable for any size firm to fully engage with this new digital experience paradigm. In order to help firms better conceptualize the staging of their adoption of digital communications, we have developed a useful grid that separates the stages of adoption into two categories. The first category is having the competitive requirement established by the Market, and the second category is having the digital “edge.” The grid then separates those two categories into the competitive market view, the principles associated with the level of adoption, and then the particular functions associated with those principles.
For example, the entry-level principle for the base market requirement is passive, one way marketing communications. The associated functional manifestation of this is a marketing website. It is how you tell your product and how to process stories. In this case, it is considered as level one. It’s important to note that although everyone now has a website, not all of them artfully and effectively tells their story. However, at the other end of the spectrum, level 10 in the stages of adoption are hybrid ways that wealth managers are incorporating robo-adviser functionality into their service delivery. This is definitely on the digital edge and not currently a requirement, but there are those with whom you are competing that are now fully engaged in figuring this out. The digital experience was well received at InvestCloud’s User Conference. Therefore, we will be going through each of the 10 stages of functional adoption next two weeks. If you would like more information on InvestCloud and how our PWP approach make digital adoption more practical and affordable, contact us at 888-800-0188
or visit us at www.investcloud.com Michael Smith, InvestCloud’s Head of Sales started his career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in mechanical and electrical engineering and then moved into Deloitte's financial services practice where he led firm's western region Capital Markets Technology practice. He has been the Co-Chair for Hedge Funds Care Los Angeles and a Member of NICSA's West Coast and Technology committees. He received his MBA from Columbia University.