Xeye Focuses on Integration
Responding to a growing demand for integrated solutions, Xeye, a provider of wealth management technologies, has made its way down the Web services road. According to Xeye CEO Craig O'Neill, many of the firm's clients, specifically financial advisers, are desperate to increase their productivity under a baby boomer load of business. One way to improve their efficiency is to do more in the same application rather than having to toggle from one to the next for vital information.
"Integration is the key to that," says O'Neill. "Integration in the sense that it takes away noise - non-value-added activity."
And the key to that integration is Web services based on a services-oriented architecture (SOA), O'Neill relates. With such integration capabilities, Xeye feels it can offer a platform of seamlessly connected tools from which clients can pick and choose components, he adds.
Over the past 12 months, O'Neill says, Xeye (booth 1852) has been able to make its offerings "wide open" to integration at different levels with other systems. "That runs the gamut from getting data in batch from mainframe systems through to close, to real-time asynchronous messaging, to real-time synchronous Web services," he says.
Meanwhile, Xeye clients are looking to identify their most profitable investors to ensure they are getting ample attention. That is being accomplished through a technique called practice management, O'Neill says. Specifically, the idea is to take a relationship-centric view of the business, leveraging technology in the areas of data aggregation and consolidated reporting to identify those active investors.
The company also has been experiencing demand for actionable alerts from its clients, and again, the name of the game is integration, O'Neill continues. The alerts in question can be created by melding customer information and customer value metrics with life events and events that are occurring in their portfolios.
Advisers, O'Neill says, can make use of such alerts to be more proactive, "Not because they are scouring reams of reports every day, but because their tools and systems are sending really intelligent alerts to them when they need to know."
Over the next few months, Xeye will be introducing a new Web-based front end that O'Neill describes as being zero-footprint and JavaScript-enabled. The company also is working on establishing prebuilt interfaces with key partners so it can go to market with such relationships already in place. "It's just a matter of time for us to offer up a larger and larger suite of those," he says.
The interfaces could connect to market data systems or with financial planning systems for proposal generation. "It really runs the gamut," O'Neill says. But such connections are not made without labor, O'Neill notes, so Xeye must be judicious about the partners with which it decides to pre-integrate. "We're trying to really cherry-pick and select key vendors that we believe are real market leaders and are aligned with us properly," he says. "We will make the investment in prebuilding those interfaces so clients don't need to concern themselves with that - they know it will just work out of the box."
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