ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITY
1st – The Exchange is a market leading provider of technology solutions to the financial services market. The company provides an integrated suite of technology solutions, software and consultancy to the financial services industry, to help support the key stages of a distributor’s business process.
The Exchange is the largest provider of online comparative quotations and electronic new business applications in the UK financial services portal market. Its main product is Exweb, which is the UK’s leading intermediary trading platform in the financial services market, used by approximately 27,000 registered users within authorised advisory firms. It provides online information and transaction services, with 185 million client illustrations processed to date over the service since January 2008.
THE CHALLENGE
As a membership organisation, it is critical to The Exchange that it provides up to date and relevant services for its users in an effective and easy to use manner.
Having built an intuitive and successful web portal, Exweb, The Exchange was looking to provide access to a mobile website to its users. This was important because when an IFA is with a client, they will not necessarily have access to the web portal. They may, for example, be at a client’s home. The capability to provide either an indicative or full quotation during a meeting enables the IFAs to deliver a quicker and more effective level of service to their clients.
Traditionally it has been difficult to create mobile websites that can be accessed by all devices. There is no single standard operating system for mobile phones and there are a variety of different browsers embedded within mobile handsets.
To further complicate matters, mobile phones have different screen sizes, meaning that creating one mobile website that can be accessed by all mobile devices has been a challenge. Typically companies have either gone to the expense of creating multiple versions of the same site for different handsets, which is a labour and cost intensive exercise. The alternative has been to create a generic mobile website that may not fit a mobile screen and can include broken links or content that cannot be properly displayed on the phone. This delivers an extremely poor brand representation.
Initially, The Exchange decided to create a mobile web solution for certain Nokia and Blackberry devices, in order to test how subscribers reacted to having a mobile website to use and to understand more about usage patterns. Once this trial had been concluded successfully, the challenge for The Exchange was to roll out a fully featured mobile website that could be easily accessed from all mobile devices to support members in the Annuities market.
THE SOLUTION
Having evaluated a number of partners, The Exchange decided to team up with bemoko to roll out a mobile website to their users. bemoko provides consultancy and software solutions that enable organisations to quickly and effectively create mobile internet solutions for all mobile phones.
Uniquely, bemoko’s software solutions allows almost every mobile handset that is internet enabled to access a mobile website and see the content as if it has been designed exclusively for that handset. bemoko’s solution recognises which handset is visiting a mobile website and delivers a fully optimised version of the site to that particular handset.
If the handset supports certain technologies (for example Flash) the solution will deliver that particular content, however, if it does not, the content will not be delivered and instead the page will automatically be configured to be suitable to the size of screen, operating system and mobile browser embedded into the handset. The result is that, whatever handset is accessing the site, the mobile web pages fit the screen and do not display content that cannot be viewed, removing the broken links and poorly fitting pages that can be associated with the mobile web experience.
The Exchange had a series of specific criteria to fulfil: it needed to enable users to input important information such as a client’s age and requirements easily; it also needed to deliver usable results to IFAs quickly and reliably. Most importantly the site needed to be accessible from any mobile phone.
bemoko worked with The Exchange to develop a bespoke solution that delivered an effective mobile website within The Exchange’s criteria. Rather than suggesting a solution that would have required a major technology upheaval for The Exchange, bemoko was flexible enough to develop a solution that suited the core technology environment within which The Exchange operated its services.
Both the bemoko team and The Exchange technical staff collaborated to ensure that the solution was effective and deliverable. Considerable support was also provided from Microsoft, since The Exchange works in a .NET framework.
OUTCOMES
The collaboration has provided a highly effective mobile website that can be clearly and easily displayed on all but the very oldest mobile phones.
The solution has been launched and is now being used by IFAs across the UK, providing them with another flexible and relevant service from The Exchange and allowing The Exchange to demonstrate its market innovation and thought leadership in a new area.
The Exchange is now considering the implementation of the second phase of the mobile platform to deliver additional services to its customers.
CONCLUSION
The mobile environment has traditionally been seen as one that has been too expensive or too difficult to deliver a meaningful service. The challenge of either having to build multiple micro sites for different devices at significant cost, or relying upon automatically re-rendering content has meant that many organisations have avoided creating mobile web solutions.
Yet the ubiquity of the mobile phone, along with the increasing number of people who are using data services on mobile means that it is difficult for organisations to ignore the mobile opportunity any more. By recognising the value that a mobile solution could provide to its members, The Exchange has been a pioneer.
By partnering with bemoko, The Exchange was able to offer a truly personalised service to its customers at a fraction of the cost of creating mobile sites for each relevant device without compromising usability to the end user.
About 1st – The Exchange
1st – The Exchange is a market leading provider of technology solutions to the financial services market.
The Company provides an integrated suite of technology solutions, software and consultancy to the financial services industry, which helps support the key stages of an intermediary’s business process, whatever its size. In doing so, this enables users to service their clients more efficiently and profitability, whilst meeting regulatory demands, reducing costs and maximising profits.
The Exchange’s Exweb is the largest provider of online comparative quotations and electronic new business applications in the UK financial services portal market with over 27,000 users. It provides online information and transaction services, with 125 million client illustrations processed over the service in 2007.
1st develops, markets and supports software delivering financial planning, client management and full back office administration to financial intermediaries. 1st’s ‘Adviser Office’ software, is the market-leading client management solution used by more than 1,600 Adviser firms offering wealth management and financial advice, both Multi-tied and Independent. Based on Microsoft SQL Server and .net Technology, Adviser Office and Adviser Evolution link with over 60 partners, including product providers, portals and fund supermarkets to aggregate client data and avoid any data re-keying.