ADOBE CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
Financial Services Firm

Leading financial services firm engages customers with a feature-rich, financial reporting tool built around powerful Adobe Flex and Adobe LiveCycle ES

Challenges

• Engage tiers of users with turnkey, flexible financial reporting tools

Solution

• Interactive financial reporting for clients and brokers
• Portfolio analytics

Customer is using a RIA (Rich Internet Application) developed in Adobe Flex and LiveCycle ES to offer customers and partners easy access to financial reporting services that graphically present personalized, branded investment data.

Results

• Launched a fast, flexible, rich-media enterprise application to gain a competitive advantage
• Enabled clients to aggregate account data via a highly interactive interface
• Minimized development time and costs
• Optimized application performance and user experience using remoting and data paging

Systems At A Glance

Adobe Flex
Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES
Adobe Flash
Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional

Customer quote

“Our new application built using Adobe Flex and LiveCycle ES has the look and feel of a desktop application with tremendous processing power behind it to analyze investment data on the fly in highly graphical ways.”
IT Manager
Platform:
Red Hat Linux ES
JBOSS 4.0.4 6A
Postgress 8.1

Partnering for success

When selling investment services, providing clients with responsive, reliable services can make the difference between winning or losing business. At Pinnacle, a renowned financial services provider, delivering an engaging customer experience is integral to the firm’s core mission.

Since 1994, Pinnacle has been helping high-net-worth investors, institutions, and retirement plan sponsors achieve excellent returns by modeling portfolios based on academic research and Nobel Prize winning economic theory. Investors may only access Pinnacle’s portfolio management services through a select number of top independent financial advisors across the United States.

When Pinnacle set out to launch a line of turnkey asset management tools, they looked to Brookwood Media Arts to develop a comprehensive asset management solution that could be customized to serve three levels of users: clients, investment advisors, and broker/dealers. The developers at Brookwood responded by using Adobe Flex to develop a secure rich Internet application (RIA). The solution enables Pinnacle stakeholders and financial custodial institutions to access up-to-the-minute account data through a highly graphical interface.

Selling the experience, reaping the rewards

Dave, Principal at Pinnacle, explains that in addition to delivering good return on investments, professionals in the financial services industry need to “sell the experience.” Previously, Pinnacle customers could only view their account information by clicking through to third party custodial partners sites, such as Schwab or Fidelity. That was a problem for Pinnacle in terms of branding, second-hand user engagement, and the inability to present data in flexible, digestible ways.

At the same time, Pinnacle wanted to eliminate clunky page refreshes, be able to manipulate large amounts of data on the fly, and give customers instant satisfaction when they looked at their accounts. They also wanted to provide advisors and brokers with tools to manage people and their performance without additional client software installations or tedious plug-in downloads.

Rich multipurpose analytics

“When our partners at Brookwood showed us how dynamically Flex applications present data, we knew we knew we found the way to help our people really understand how assets are performing,” says Mark, IT Manager at Pinnacle. “Our new application built using Flex has the look and feel of a desktop application with tremendous processing power behind it to analyze investment data on the fly in highly graphical ways.”

According to Mark, the Flex solution interface is rich, fun to use, and stands above any other solution that might have been built with an off-the-shelf product or from scratch using AJAX technology. Depending on the user—an individual investor, an advisor, or a dealer—Pinnacle’s web-based, “desktop-feel” solution delivers more personalized experiences suited to individual needs. At all levels of use, data is collected from multiple financial custodial sites, with the help of Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES to efficiently access backend data sources. Collected data is presented to users to provide a consistent experience across institutions.

At the client level, individual investors can securely log in 24/7 to an elegant dashboard created in Flex and have immediate access to the most recent, accurate financial information—without having to log into third-party sites or waiting for page refreshes. Asset allocations can be viewed interactively by clicking on slices of various pie charts to drill down into fund performance charts. “Customers like viewing account information this way—and that’s a big part of reinforcing our brand in a competitive industry,” say Mark.

The application’s second group of users includes investment advisors who want to handle data over multiple investors’ accounts to get a rollout view of what his or her business looks like, measure performance, and view fees at a higher level of summary than the individual dashboard. Charting and graphic interactivity abounds.

In addition, the system serves brokers and dealers who have multiple advisors under them and are overseeing advisor performance, fee structures, and making sure Pinnacle advisors are “doing right by their clients.”

Rapidly built, extensible application

“After performing due diligence and considering other open source technologies, the Brookwood team chose to use Adobe Flex on this project for its rapid development capabilities and for its reliable, ubiquitous deployment assurances via the Adobe Flash Player. It took one full-time and one part-time developer just two months to build Pinnacle’s Flex application. Many pre-built components in Flex, like the charting feature, saved the developers significant coding time” said Tina Martin, Vice President, Enterprise Development at Brookwood.

Throughout the development process, the Brookwood and Pinnacle teams used Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional to virtually meet and review the latest version of the Flex application at the desktop level.

Brookwood is also looking to other Adobe solutions to further enhance Pinnacle’s drive to gain a competitive edge. To create custom reports in the Flex application, Brookwood is leveraging the Portable Document Format (PDF) generation feature in Adobe LiveCycle ES to round out the business process. “We want clients to have a completely professional experience engaging with Pinnacle,” says Mark. “During meetings, we don’t want our advisors to scramble and have to pull screen shots into Excel in order to hand the customer a report.”

Instead, Adobe LiveCycle ES can pull data and graphical assets such as charts and graphs directly into preformatted, multipage PDF forms with just a few clicks of the mouse. “Highly branded, custom reports make the customer feel good about doing business with Pinnacle,” adds Mark. “That’s our goal.”