GENERATION,
LENDINGTREE CRIES
FOUL.
Visa teams with U.S.
Bank to lure corporates.
New drives take a bite
out of energy use.
OCTOBER 2009
TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION. BUSINESS RESULTS.
VOL. 22 NO. 10
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS
Opinions
Become
A New
Science
New tools aim to sift
through Web chatter to
identify trends
CASH MANAGEMENT
BofA, Citi Call
In the SOA
Plumbers
Big new payment projects leave legacy systems
behind, and vault new architectures to prime time
Social networking, blogs and
other forms of Internet content
are generating a tidal wave of
opinions on subjects topical and
obscure. Usually, the vast majority of these opinions are ignored,
dismissed as having little value.
But some argue these opinions,
if aggregated, sifted and analyzed
correctly, could offer valuable insights into the public’s perception and mood on individual
companies, people and products.
Seth Grimes, founder of consulting firm Alta Plana, says that
so-called “sentiment analysis” offered by several technology companies involves sophisticated algorithms intended to listen to
customers and understand what
they’re saying and in what context. “For brand and reputational
management this is a real
growth area,” he says. In the
case of financial services “there’s
a lot of opinions about sales and
Customer Tactics, page 25
Union Bank EVP Wanda Guttas heads an upgrade project that could be a national blueprint. COVER STORY Page 20 THE AMERICAN CORE
While Citigroup and Bank of America’s sweeping new cash
management products may be primarily aimed at busting open new
doors to usability and customer interaction, together signal the mainstream arrival of service oriented architecture—and its potential
to overcome the limitations of legacy systems.
“This is a way to enable the bank to offer a better customer experience on the front end by having better piping on the back end,”
says Jacob Jegher, a senior analyst at Celent, who says the banks’
new projects were a sign that institutions are seeing wider benefits
in SOA and are beginning to embrace the user-friendly capabilities of Web 2.0 applications.
Citi and BofA’s respective plays are among the biggest projects
to date to take advantage of SOA. Citi’s CitiDirect BE (for “bank-
Leading Off page 11
MOBILE BANKING
CUs Cooperate on Mobile
CO-OP Mobile uses shared branching tech to cut deployment costs
Eaton Family Credit Union
had been interested in deploying mobile banking for
some time, but its initial research into the channel turned
out to be little more than expensive window-shopping.
“It was just way beyond our
means,” says Fred Siegel, business development manager for
the 11,000 member Cleveland-area credit union, which has
about $39 million in assets.
“But [the cooperative approach]
made a lot of sense. The people
who have signed up for it seem
to love it. The co-op was the deciding factor for us.”
A division of CO-OP Financial Services, CO-OP Mobile,
allows credit unions to deploy
mobile banking with minimal
upfront expense. The service
has been gathering steam over
past couple of months, signing
seven new clients in early August alone, with a total of 20
signed contracts. Additionally,
the vendor also recently
signed six reseller agreements.
For the CO-OP, which
first hired mFoundry to provide mobile banking in October 2008 and announced CO-OP Mobile in February, the
new deals suggest growing de-
Source: KPMG, “Insights into global payments”
Some mobile payment
vendors estimate
75%
of transactions are (usually crude)
fraud attempts
