Wall Street & Technology Article On New Transparency

Wall Street & Technology just pushed an article that has a few Sendside clients mentioned prominently discussing the need for financial service businesses to manage their communication streams and focus on customer needs.

Wall Street Adjusts To Transparency Demands

Contango's Bichler points out that while there is no such thing as providing clients with too much comfort, firms must take clients' time constraints into consideration. "We have clients who have a strong understanding of the market but a finite amount of time to do communications," he says. "We need a channel to communicate with them."

Until the financial crisis rocked the markets nearly a year ago, Contango used to send out paper communications or e-mails to clients, Bichler relates. But that's no longer sufficient. The market might move 3 or 4 percent very quickly, and clients want to know immediately what is happening, Bichler says, adding, "We knew we needed a stronger electronic solution."

Eight months ago, Contango started using technology from Sendside Networks, which launched a new tool for brokerage and hedge fund clients that combines Web content, audio, video, Flash presentations or existing print collateral into a single, multimedia message.

To avoid overloading clients, "We're trying to tailor our communications to what our clients want to see," Bichler explains. "People who want to simplify their lives do not want too much excess content." Personalizing communications to customer preferences, he continues, is what creates loyalty.

To that end, says Loughton of Praesideo Management, which also uses Sendside, the insight the solution provides on how clients respond to messages is particularly valuable. "You can see whether they're opening a message and [in the case of an audio message] spending time listening to it," he relates.

It's nice to see our financial service clients responding so positively to what we're doing at Sendside. Of course, fin services is just one of the vertical segments using Sendside.