Everything is Coming up Professional! -- June 30, 2006. (An interview with Brian Curry, VP of AOL’s Premium and Subscription Services)
Earlier this week I had the privilege of speaking at length with Brian Curry, Vice President for AOL’s Premium and Subscription Services regarding their new offerings surrounding AIM Pro. While the discussion centered on AOL’s new enterprise capabilities augmented by WebEx functionality, my unique area of interest surrounded the on-going and potential functionality of this new class of business “communication solutions.”
I use term communication solutions or what I believe is more appropriate, Enterprise Instantaneous Communications (EIC), to refer to a new and more robust class of instant messaging (IM) clients, networks, and management tools that will meet the needs of the business enterprise and its complex application integrations. While some would consider this a bit ostentatious of me dropping the IM label for the new EIC solution set acronym, my projections tell me that what we considered to be just an IM personal collaboration tool for the twenty-something crowd has now advanced into a toolset with measurable productivity and integration capabilities. In short, with radical changes in the base technologies of IM coupled with the cross-discipline integration of data, text, and video solutions, we now can establish a definitive and defensible business case for corporate adoption. With this maturity step, IM is no longer just for Generation X and Y – it has gone mainstream with an eye towards profit and revenue.
With professional versions of client software combined with mission critical availability of their networks, AOL and their partners are expanding into data encryption and virus scanning, application extension capabilities (i.e., leveraging a corporations’ huge investments in legacy systems), network management, and a business-friendly delivery model. Although each of the aforementioned are at varying levels of robustness, it marks for those of us within financial services (FSI), the first genuine EIC that has the promise of being employed for internal and external customer services, product servicing, and usage profiling.
For FSI it is this latter ability, the adoption of customer and employee EIC profiles, which allow our enterprises to take advantage of classifications and usage patterns that in turn, can assist with resource projections, automated or agent responses, risk mitigation, cross-selling and up-selling, and niche servicing. Executives envision the professional solutions as providing a delivery channel that is not a not as rigid as a web page or costly as a customer service agent (CSR), while providing a wealth of data uses for revenue opportunities, process efficiencies, and alliance relationships (e.g., one-stop-shopping).
Let’s take a hypothetical example of how an EIC solution might utilize these advances for a FSI customer base. As we know, there is roughly $10 to $12 trillion dollars of outstanding residential mortgage debt in the USA up from just under $4 trillion just eight (8) years ago. Combined with complex lending arrangements and risky credit rules, the need to assess the on-going risk within a mortgage servicing portfolio has never been greater. Furthermore, we’ve witnessed a rapid increase in delinquencies and foreclosures as the market has changed leading home prices to soften while simultaneously experiencing rising interest rates, falling originations, and a void of quality refinancing. Bottom line, the competition of retention and servicing of existing, quality credit customers is significant given the foreseeable market conditions.
However, how do we know in advance if a customer who we thought was solvent is having difficulty or increasing their risk for default? Often times a customer sends signals to our contact centers and web sites that just don’t get integrated or related due to variations in software, internal processes, and training. With the use of EIC, we have the potential to capture, classify, and trend using sophisticated data mining methods and techniques the traffic patterns and text in an effort to profile risk and understand the leading indicators for customer financial difficulty.
Even though this solution is not commercially available today, there are numerous risk management firms and software vendors that already analyze quantitative and qualitative scores as part of the mortgage origination process and most in a near real-time dialogue. With the adoption of IM professional or EIC solutions becoming more prevalent, it is highly probable that these mitigation solutions will be eagerly received by executives seeking to predict profits and revenues in a market (mortgage) that is moving to a low-margin business with decreasing volumes.
For AOL, Brian, and their partners, I would like to think these “extensions” of their professional offerings are already being planned – we’ll just have to wait and see if my projections prove correct in the months to come. In the meantime, the new AIM PRO clearly provides a substantive change in how IM should be used within the confines of the enterprise. It is an excellent first step providing the relevance for industry innovation.
I wish you the best of success.
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