Xinnovation

Join us at 12pm, Wednesday, February 29th for Microsoft’s Customer Solution Discovery Day in Waltham, MA.  The afternoon will consist of partners presenting a short overview of their solution followed by a ‘tradeshow’ style networking and cocktail hour with time to speak with specific partners that have solutions to meet your current needs.

Topics will include guidance on how to leverage solutions to:

• Extend relationships with your customers and partners
• Provide robust functionality for collaboration, content management and social media
• Automate manual business processes or streamline performance management processes
• Help organizations that are challenged to strategically plan, prioritize and execute projects
• Allow employees to stay connected while mobile or disconnected from the office

The event is FREE and by INVITATION-ONLY.  While at the event, register to win an Xbox 360.  Please reach out to us at ctaylor@xinn.com to learn more about how you can attend this great event.

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In light of the New Year, we thought we would analyze the expected technology trends of 2012.  Some of them we found obvious (the world is going more paperless?) but others were surprising, and very exciting.  Here are the two that will affect all of us, from consumers to businesses.

Social Technologies (if they haven’t already) will alter how we communicate with one another, both professionally and personally.

Social technologies (if they haven’t already) will alter how we communicate with one another, both professionally and personally.  And it seems like everyone, from politicians to celebrities to scientists to business people, is tweeting about topics important to them, and keeping up with the newest trends.

In 2011, we saw Twitter making a huge difference with news reporting, when videos and information about the tsunami in Japan was spreading faster than any article could be written and circulated online.  The occupy movement was another tour du force for social media, and brought our attention to live video blogging sites with recording and posting capabilities, all from the screen of a cell phone.  According to industry experts, social media is not slowing down or peaking, and companies and individuals alike need to keep up or get left behind.

Release of Apple iPad 3:

Apple aims to continue its dominance in the world of tablets this spring (February or March … depends who you ask) with the release of the iPad3.  The iPad was revolutionary in modifying how users interacted with their electronic world, and has changed the face of sales to a more streamlined and paperless world.  The iPad 3 will contain many new features that far outstrip the iPad 2.  A thinner and trimmed design (down 20% from the iPad 2) and a lighter battery reduce the weight of the unit, while an A6 quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor makes the iPad 3 as powerful as any high end desktop.  Add in the 3D features, retina display, better camera, cloud computing, and the addition of a humble assistant, Siri, the iPad 3 is easily considered to be the best gadget to purchase this 2012.  And the best part?  The iPad 3 will be fingerprint proof.

This product actually has the ability to replace your desktop computer, the new size and amazing features make it the premium product of the market, and Apple knows you want it.  It might be more expensive than other tablets on the market, but back up your apps now, and give your iPad 2 to your niece or nephew: There’s a new tablet in town.

The 2012 technology trends are very exciting and we at Xinnovation couldn’t be more excited about the impact they will make on our company, our clients, and our industry in 2012.

We wish you an innovative and prosperous New Year.

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To all of our clients and partners, thank you for all your support over the last year.  Happy Holidays from the Xinnovation Team!

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At this year’s 2011 SPARK Forum, Xinnovation showcased its latest, innovative solutions for the Retirement Services industry, including the Xinnovation RFP Response Solution, Retirement Plan Review Solution, and Fund Fact Sheet Solution.  Additionally, Xinnovation exhibited its mobility solution that allows secure transfer of documents directly to a tablet device and enhanced interactivity for those documents on the tablet.

Thank you to the SPARK Institute for hosting a great event.

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We would like to thank all of our clients and partners for making the 1st Annual Xinnovation User Conference a huge success!  This year’s conference theme was eXtensibility, and throughout the 2-day conference in Miami, FL, we talked about how we’re extending our clients’ ability to reach more clients, prospects, and employees through extensibility, easability, interoperability, and interactivity. 

We explored industry trends in Mobility and Tablets, Video Content, Enterprise Social (E 2.0), Cloud Computing, and their collective impact on Interactive Client Communications.  And finally, we took advantage of the opportunity to further enhance our relationships with all of the clients and partners in attendance.  Thank you for making it a great event.

We hope to see everybody at the 2012 Xinnovation User Conference!  (Date and location are TBD)

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Xinnovation is happy to announce that we will be participating in PSCA’s (Profit Sharing and 401(k) Council of America) 64th Annual National Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, September 19-22.  On Tuesday, September 20th, we will be delivering a keynote presentation, titled ‘The Future of the Client Communication Experience’, and we will also be running a workshop during the afternoon on Tuesday.

We are very excited to showcase pieces of our mobility strategy, including delivering client communications directly to your tablet device in a secure manner.  For the conference, we have provided the ability for all attendees to be able to download all conference materials directly to their iPad, reducing the amount of paper and providing convenience and efficiency for all participants.  Please visit the conference page at http://www.psca.org for more information on how to enable this technology.

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Does your firm struggle with the management and organization of the vast amounts of information available in today’s financial services world?  Though throwing additional IT resources at the problem is always an option, sometimes you have to cut your losses and turn over the data management to experts. 

Bloomberg recently launched new enterprise-level solutions and services to help companies in this realm.  These services include aggregating information from thousands of data sources, providing customized, real-time data sets over a robust, delivery channel, and allowing for the integration of firm-specific data and content as well.

Enterprise Technology Strategies for an Increasingly Dynamic Market Data Management Environment

So once you have this data, how do you accurately and seamlessly get the data into your client communications?  This is where Xinnovation comes into the picture.  We have state-of-the-art document data integration capabilities that allow you to take information from any data souce, transform the data if necessary, and build custom Microsoft Office and Adobe documents for your clients and prospects.

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Clients, Partners, and Prospects,

We cordially invite you to attend the 2011 Xinnovation User Conference, to be held this upcoming Fall in Miami, Florida. We are thrilled to be hosting our first ever user conference, and we hope you will be able to attend!

We are certainly not holding our 1st ever user conference just for the sake of holding a user conference. But instead, we see 2011 as a very important year for our company, and a VERY transformative year for the landscape of client communications. Smart phones, tablets, social networking avenues – online communication and engagement by your clients has skyrocketed in the past 2 years. Now is the time to harness the power of this increased engagement. Whether its client documents, audio, video, web casts, you have the opportunity to communicate with your clients like never before. But how to deliver all these different modes of media to your clients in a secure and organized fashion? This is where we come into the picture.

Join us in Miami. Learn more about what other clients are doing with XiDocs. Network with industry peers from other large financial institutions. Share your best practices and successes with others. And most importantly, learn about our roadmap and how we are going to help you create a COMPLETE client communication portal for the future.

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“Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”, Albert Einstein.

You just left the staff meeting and you were handed 4 more action items. Forget about prioritization – they all need to get done. Yet, you have 5 new critical client issues along with leftover action items from last week. You seem to only have two options: (i) increase your productivity with the same staff or (ii) hire additional personnel. However, your staff has already been pushed to the limits and your shrinking budget provides a barrier for (ii).

You know you need to find an alternative, because you know you can’t just keeping doing the same thing over and over again or you’ll go insane!

However, our experience shows that people delay finding that alternative for the following reasons:

• “We do things that are unique.” You could replace ‘unique’ with other common qualifiers like: special, custom, highly customized, or different. You might believe that there is no alternative, but trust us, you are not unique.
• “We don’t have the budget.” You can see the problem and would love to solve it, but you might feel that justification would be difficult. You need to present a solid ROI to senior executives in order to ensure it gets added to the next quarterly budget, and our document management software provides that ROI.
• “We have something already.” Typically, we see in-house developed systems that were built with functional requirements in mind, instead of usability and business requirements. You may also believe that switching costs would be high.  The switching costs will surprise you, and our solutions will promote a self-service culture for your firm.
• “Too busy to look at the problem.” This is very common and sometimes prevents you from identifying that you may have a problem in the first place.  We’ll help you analyze your current situation at no cost.
• “We have tried to solve the problem in the past.” For whatever reason, it didn’t work last time or you may have had shifting priorities to fully commit to the change. 

It’s certainly not an easy decision, and the best first step is to simply talk about it. Xinnovation has been helping professionals in the financial services industry for close to a decade with similar levels of insanity, if not higher. Assessing your current situation from an outside perspective can be very empowering. Once your current situation has been addressed, the next step is to better understand your options and how to address them. Our experience has shown that the fix is not as hard as most people think, and can be implemented in less than time than they thought.

Even though situation may seem manageable today, it probably won’t be in the near future with increased demand. Also, as competition in the financial services industry increases steadily, so do client expectations. It’s extremely important to be able to meet those expectations moving into the future.

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One of the only good things about missing a flight is that you have time on your hands that you weren’t expecting. As the saying goes, when life hands you lemons….you make Limoncello. As luck would have it, our misfortune had us in Chicago on the first day of the 2011 Chicago Auto Show. Road trip!

Not being a huge car buff myself, I could not help but be pulled into the excitement of it all. Jeeps driving over massively built terrain parks. The concept cars. But as you walk from one booth to another, one thing that is very clear about a car show – EVERYTHING is about creating an EXCELLENT CLIENT EXPERIENCE.

This ranges from the booth, to the carpet, to the positioning of the cars, to the people manning the booth, to the people there to “answer your questions”. After a short while, you develop a sense of what to expect, a sort of baseline for your customer experience as you enter a booth.

This level of expectation allows you to quickly determine whether the car company gets it, or whether they don’t.

• Providing bad karaoke and dressing like a teenager – Doesn’t Get It
• Replacing your car mirrors with cameras and dressing in designer outfits – Gets It

So for your client communications, ask yourself – “Are we better than the rest?” Do your clients think you really get it? How do you think your clients perceive your client communication documents, and what perception have they developed of your firm based on those documents?

Do your documents look like this?

Or do they look like this?

Clients notice EVERYTHING. We too often see companies spending man weeks of effort to assemble a client presentation or review book, only to have something in the final version that is off.

• Table of Contents with the wrong page number
• Section in the TOC that is not in the book
• A supporting PDF file that has to be handed out separately, because integration into your presentation is not easy
• One more chart or graph that would have told the story better, but there wasn’t enough time

So the document goes out and everybody is onto the next task. But at the client meeting, your client document resembles the car spokesman dressed like a teenager that is singing bad karaoke.

Don’t risk it. It’s time to dress up your client document in that designer outfit. You can’t afford to lose a client or not win that new business.

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