Unisys Launches Wealth Management Tool, Furthering Convergence

Unisys has launched a new product aimed at financial institutions seeking to provide a fully integrated, customizable, Internet-based toolkit from which they can build a customer-retaining wealth-management solution.

Called Unisys e-@ction Wealth Management Solution, the offering covers an array of financial services and is primarily targeted at retail and international banks interested in keeping pace with convergence among the securities, banking and insurance industries.

Embracing the Unisys toolkit, says Unisys Vice President and General Manager of Financial Services North America Gary Cawthorne, will help an institution retain its fair share of the "mass affluent" market (individuals holding between $150,000 and $1,000,000 in investable assets) that provides much of its profit margin.

According to Cawthorne, putting together its own Internet-based package will cost a firm time and treasure. "They could go and contract with different firms and cobble it together with their own staff," says Cawthorne. "One of the things we have done is pre-integrate these solutions, so first off we can demonstrate the vision of what clients would want and then we can unplug AP's (application program interfaces) and plug in another piece-so you realize the benefit of our spending the R&D (research and development) money to pre-integrate different components."

Those components include Unisys technology covering back-end processing (including portfolio management), financial analytics, customer profitability, operational risk management and anti-money laundering services. Also available are tax, legal advice, and estate and lifestyle planning products. Corillian will handle account aggregation and Siebel will provide the customer relationship management (CRM) component.

Account aggregation, which Cawthorne describes as employing "screen scraping" technology, is certainly among the top industry initiatives. He says that clients will provide their financial institution with all username and password information to access their accounts, wherever they might be. Then, using the Corillian technology, the client's accounts throughout the Internet are scoured and the information collected into the Unisys e-@ction Wealth Management Solution.

"Here's my password, so whenever I sign on to the bank I can get a complete picture of not only the products I have with you, but I can get a complete picture of the products I have everywhere," says Cawthorne.

The flexibility of the system-which is also accessible over wireless devices-extends down to the technology architecture as well, as the server can either be hosted by the financial institution in question or at Unisys, says Cawthorne. Additionally, the system is not dependent on any particular hardware leaving firms the prerogative of choosing their own vendors. Cawthorne adds that because the system is so highly customizable, costs are hard to pin down.

"It's all about how big the project is, what the scope is, I can tell you that a very small project might be under a million dollars," he says, "now that would be the low end-it all depends on what a client wants to accomplish."