Forrester Research: Financial Services
Forrester is an independent technology research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice about technology's impact on business.

• Technographics Survey Highlights: Q1 2007 Asia-Pacific Technographics
  This highlight deck reviews the key findings from the Q1 2007 Asia Pacific Technographics® Survey. This survey covered questions given to consumers in Asia-Pacific (i.e. Japan, South Korea, Australia, metropolitan China, and metropolitan India) around activities such as PC adoption, mobile adoption, broadband, online shopping, and social computing.
• Online Bill Pay 2007: Understanding The Mindset Of Holdouts, Fence-Sitters, And Quitters
  Just 35% of online consumers pay bills at their bank or credit union's Web site. What about the rest? Citing a preference for check writing and the need for paper bills for record keeping, 71% of non-adopters say they'll never pay bills online. Twenty-three percent of non-adopters plan to pay bills online but just haven't gotten around to it yet, and 6% did pay bills online but quit using the service. But the future adoption picture is not as bleak as it may seem — non-adopters report they could be coaxed into adoption. At the top of their wish list is something any financial firm could easily offer — an online security guarantee.
• Teleconference: Why Financial Shoppers Abandon Online Product Applications
  
• Best Practices In Release Management
  Together, increased reliance on software, greater software complexity, and diversification of the software supply chain require better release management. For application development professionals, release management is the definition, support, and enforcement of processes for transferring software to production. To meet the needs of application development, IT operations, and the business, follow three release management best practices: 1) Build a strong release team; 2) get serious about production readiness standards; and 3) continuously tune release frequency and type. These best practices may sound intuitive, but the challenge for most application development professionals is not so much in understanding them as in putting them in place.
• Enterprise Web 2.0 Q&A: Northwestern Mutual
  Enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 tools and services is growing, and The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company (Northwestern Mutual) is among the early adopters. The traditionally conservative company began investigating Web 2.0 in 2005 and has since deployed blogs and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to its entire employee base of about 5,000. Northwestern Mutual has seen improvements in corporate communications, team productivity, and worker productivity as a result. Like many firms though, Northwestern Mutual has struggled to determine a hard return on investment (ROI); questions about the further applicability of Web 2.0 to the enterprise still linger; and the company has seen strong, but not blockbuster, employee usage. For information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals, the Northwestern Mutual case holds valuable lessons.
• Case Study: Northwestern Mutual Builds A High-Performing Release Team
  Northwestern Mutual has excelled at building a high-performance release team — one of the critical success factors in release management. What makes the firm's release team work so well? Close alignment with testing and test environment management, open communication channels, a willingness and ability to drop changes that don't keep up with the rest of the release, and smart metrics to measure its own success. The value of such a team is apparent: Northwestern Mutual's desktop apps are stable, and its field offices are happy and productive.
• Best And Worst Of Brand Building Web Sites, 2007: Financial Services
  The financial services industry features some of the most recognized brand names in the world, like Citi Smith Barney, JP Morgan-Chase, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and UBS. But how good is the brand experience offered by major financial services Web sites? To find out, we graded the sites of five top brands on how well they communicate their Brand Image and deliver value to consumers (Brand Action). No sites passed our Brand Image tests, and only one site — Morgan Stanley — passed our Brand Action tests.
• Will The iPhone Boost Mobile Banking?
  Five months after Apple launched the iPhone in the US, the iPhone has gone on sale in Europe. Now banks are asking: "How will it affect mobile banking?" We think that the iPhone is an important evolutionary step for mobile banking. On the one hand, it raises the bar on user experience and will spark mobile Internet adoption. On the other hand, it adds complexity by introducing an additional low-cost alternative for banks to offer transactional mobile banking. In the short run, eBusiness executives should optimize their online banking services for the iPhone but reconsider further investments in current mobile banking services. In the long run, they should prepare for new — mobile — usage scenarios for compelling mobile finance applications.
• Customer Experience Index Snapshot: Health Plans
  Forrester asked nearly 5,000 US consumers about their interactions with a variety of companies, gauging the usefulness, usability, and enjoyability of those experiences. Based on these consumer responses, we calculated the Customer Experience Index for 112 firms in nine different industries. In this document we take a closer look at the 10 health plans that were included in the index. As an industry, health plans fell to the bottom of the CxPi rankings. Only one of the firms, Kaiser, did not receive a "poor" or "very poor" rating. There's an enormous opportunity for health plans to radically improve their customer experience — and go after the majority of consumers that are interested in switching plans.
• Technographics® Survey Highlights: North American Financial Services Online Survey, Q3 2007
  This highlight deck reviews the key findings from the Q3 2007 Financial Services Online Survey. This survey covered questions given to US adults around financial products and habits.
• Three Areas Where Metrics Are Vital To Improve Your Financial Services eBusiness Strategy
  While the interest in metrics is growing, eBusiness managers struggle to understand what to measure and how to use those metrics. Effective use of metrics can help in dozens of key areas, including search marketing, home page navigation and design, and feature and functionality decisions. To make their metrics actionable, eBusiness managers must obsess over the basics like conversion rates and then fill in the gaps using customer feedback surveys and search data.
• Case Study: North American Financial Institution Makes SIM A Win-Win Decision
  This case study features a North American financial institution that initially deployed a SIM tool to get better visibility from its perimeter security devices. But after deploying Network Intelligence's nVision product, the company found the data so rich in information that it decided to extend deployment across its internal systems. The financial institution also deployed the system in such a way to allow system owners to query the data they were collecting for troubleshooting and performance purposes. The security team liked it because it provided a more comprehensive view of activity within the organization, while the system owners valued the wealth of additional information they were able to glean.
• Best Practices: Security Information Management
  Security Information Management (SIM) solutions are no longer the sole domain of the largest organizations. More than one third of enterprises plan to deploy SIM tools by the middle of 2008, and those that have invested the time and effort in the tools already are reaping the benefits, streamlining existing processes, and implementing active monitoring controls where there were none previously. Successful organizations get the best benefit from their SIM implementations when they establish their immediate SIM needs clearly, but have a clear vision for what they want SIM to deliver in the future.
• Canadian Trends In Researching And Applying For Financial Products Online
  Forrester surveyed 6,004 Canadian adults to