Financial Execs Preview Next-Generation Mobile Technology

Whether or not to deploy mobile applications is no longer a valid question for the 214 executives attending today's Financial Mobility Summit in Boston. These execs, from firms such as MFS, Evergreen Investments, American Funds, Eaton Vance and Alliance Bernstein, are all old hands at delivering applications via Blackberry to at least one group of constituents, be they portfolio managers, wholesalers or institutional investment managers.American Funds, for instance, has 150 users using a mobile CRM package the firm calls Mobile Wisdom. "Salespeople don't want to lug laptops around on trips," says Kevin Butscher, an executive at the firm. An old application that involved daily synchronizations of Siebel data via dialup took too long and specific data was hard to find. Today, the data access is close to real-time. Salespeople can easily call customers without having to call into the office to obtain phone numbers. In the future, American Funds would like to integrate its mobile applications with its Concur expense report software, store user preferences ("a lot of wholesalers are creatures of habit," Butscher says), and provide improved reports via Blackberry.

At MFS, "we consider Blackberries to be risk mitigators," says Joe Piotrowski, vice president, fixed income/equity technology. When trades are called or emailed in, there's a lot of potential for mistakes to be made in translation or mistyping. When portfolio managers use a mobile application (in this case, Pyxis Mobile's mPortfolio), there's a much greater chance of the transaction being accurate. MFS research analysts use mobile applications to distribute their research. "A lot of the value of original research is being able to convey it to the portfolio managers quickly," Piotrowski says.

Evergreen Investment Services uses Pyxis Mobile's mWholesaler application to improve wholesaler productivity and efficiency. "Return on investment analysis becomes educational," says Paul O'Brien, chief administrative officer. "Providing mobile applications to our retail sales force is part of doing business, like providing laptops," he says. At his organization, the most used sales report is a large order report. When a large order comes in, a manager can see it on his device, click on the customer name and call that person to thank them immediately.

Hedge fund managers are avid users of mobile devices, says Shane Hughes, president and CEO of Pyxis Mobile (the organizer of this event), who use them to constantly track their P&L, even when they're at sporting events.

Arun Nagarajum, senior wireless architect at Pyxis Mobile, demonstrated six of the next-generation applications the company is working on:

1. Location-based services that take advantage of the GPS chips embedded in most Blackberries to provide location coordinates that can be combined with mapping software and other applications such that, for instance, a salesperson driving through Boston could receive an ever-shifting list of nearby customers and prospects with their addresses and navigational guidance to those locations.

2. Voice-activated applications, such as voice commands (e.g. "find John Smith's account information" or "email John Smith") and voice dictation that gets translated into text, for instance for call reports.

3. The ability to print directly from a Blackberry, using a tiny Brother thermal printer and transmitting the print instructions through Bluetooth (this is actually available today).

4. Integration of calendar, email, and other application data, such that, for example, as a customer's email arrives in an investment firm employee's mailbox, so does an account update and other relevant information.

5. Integration of camera and image technology, so that customer photos could be stored with their account data or an insurance adjuster could file photos of an accident scene with a report.

6. Signature capture using a special pen that captures penstrokes, transmitting signature data to the Blackberry using Bluetooth. This could be used for contracts and documents.

Other technologies the company is looking at incorporating in its applications include a flexible 19" screen from Samsung that folds up to pocket-size and embedded projectors from Light Blue Optics.

The 6.0 version of Pyxis Mobile's basic platform is due out in March. It will include an application development environment that's eagerly anticipated by attendees here - instead of waiting for the vendor to include requested features in a future release, firms will be able to easily tweak and modify the Pyxis applications in their own IT shops. The 6.0 platform will also provide role-based administration, such that users will only be able to access certain role-defined data sets. It will also offer enhanced reports, support for .net and support for Windows mobile devices.