May, 2008 – Meeting B2B objectives through user experience design: a case study at PFPC

Jerome Nadel: Hello, I'm Jerome Nadel, HFI's Chief Experience Officer and I'm excited to share today's webcast titled "Meeting B2B Objectives through User Experience Design: A Case Study at PNC Financial." This is a wonderful and compelling case study that reinforces that good and effective user experience design begins with strategy - a story of a service provider's market position, business model, acquisition strategy and a mandate for adoption and usage. With that, it's my pleasure to introduce Eileen Gilfedder, our Vice-President at PFPC. Welcome, Eileen.

Eileen Gilfedder: Thanks Jerome. You know, as we started out on our AdvisorCentral® redesign projects, we had a clear set of objectives that we were looking to accomplish with the project. Tactically, we were looking to improve the system performance, to make some changes to the user interface and navigation and you know, basically improve the screen design of the – of the product that we had in place. And these tactical goals made up you know, several components of our overall longer-term strategy. What became pretty clear early on in the process was that the user experience was a strategy in itself and when we approached this project from that perspective, the project itself took on a new dimension and I think that the organization as a whole really bought into what we were trying to accomplish.

Jerome Nadel: That's why I'm so excited to share this on this webcast. Again, it's much more than just user experience-it is really user experience or what I'll refer to as "success-based" design applied towards service organization. Before we move on, let me set a set of reminders over here. There is a case study on our website to be downloaded and I encourage you to look at that. It gives some more detail about some of the collaboration and some of the success that's come out of that. As well, you can view the complete schedule of webcasts for the remainder of 2008 and I remind you, as we will be taking questions in the last ten to fifteen minutes, that you can submit questions from the "Submit Question" button at the bottom lower right-hand corner of your displays. With that, there are essentially four sections to this dialogue that we are going to share. I'll begin with a little bit of the user experience mandate. A little bit of context and perspective around the shifting scope of user experience design. We'll then transition over to Eileen and she'll share a little bit of perspective on PFPC – the business model, an overview, how they fit into PNC at large and some of the success criteria that were really foundational for this collaboration and for where they are in the market today. We'll come back and I'll share a little bit of the case study. What was the sequence of the user experience steps that we followed, once again, beginning with strategy to end with an informed and rational design that in fact, was just deployed only last week.

Eileen Gilfedder: Yes, yes.

Jerome Nadel: So you'll be hearing kind of "hot news" on how this initial deployment is going and then we'll come back to Eileen to speak to trends in financial markets and she'll give a kind of global perspective on how she sees the market evolving and how their organization is moving to meet these changing dynamics. So let's move forward. I'd suggest that the first provocative statement over here that "user centered design is too altruistic". In fact, we could change the language that we use and shift from user centered to user experience design to success centered design and suggest further that the user interface is the medium to influence or elicit the kind of behavior that's expected, once again reinforcing that it begins with strategy. It's incumbent on the organization to define what are our objectives? What would we like to have happen and how can this digital medium support that? Again, as we speak to the case study, that will very much be the theme. What are the success criteria? Are there KPIs? Are there measures in place? How can we use the totality of the user interface and the interaction it enables to influence behaviors of course in this case, it's going to be primarily financial advisors – independent financial advisors and brokers.

Eileen Gilfedder: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: Another observation and this is becoming a repeated theme in many of the verticals that we support and what we see as a general trend. In fact, we live in a self-serve world no longer just elective in our personal lives, where we can go e-tail, retail and be served or serve ourselves but more and more in the business environments where we work, we're mandated to use self-serve style applications and from the service provider perspective, essentially you have limited control over mandating any kind of usage of the platform that you provide which enables transactions for PFPC.

Eileen Gilfedder: Right. You can offer a platform and you can offer multiple platforms but if the platform itself doesn't give the user or in our case, the advisor or the operations folks, what they need in an easy simple way then it won't be usage you expect.

Jerome Nadel: And we found that in the data gathering here and we find that once gain, cross vertical although we're focused on service provider in the financial vertical, this I think is relevant, cross-vertical here that don't count on being the place people will come. They will find other workarounds, other alternatives so it's important to understand that we're enabling self-serve but to do that effectively, we transition to the next point. And that is, that it's not only about performance or the ability to do, but it's also about persuasion and in our past-most recent webcast we were speaking or two back actually, about the notion of Persuasion, Emotion and Trust and this slide is highlighting some of that. Again, it's not only about performance based design, designing something that's structurally and ergonomically effective but also about persuasive design ensuring that there is an emotive affect and persuasion to in fact, embrace in this case, the tool that's being provided. So if you will, the equation on the bottom suggests that performance plus persuasion equals these measures of success – conversion in the Web 2.0, maybe its contribution but here very relevantly, it's uptake on usage.

Eileen Gilfedder: Yeah and in this particular case you know, one of the things that we are trying to deliver on behalf of our clients were actually asset management or mutual fund companies is a product or a service that they can rely on to make available to their key clients, you know those advisors and intermediaries that sell their products and those advisors often rate those fund companies based upon the products and services that we are supplying for them and that is often measured in the usage of what you are delivering.

Jerome Nadel: So if they're not using it, you're not successful.

Eileen Gilfedder: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: And we'll talk about through this case study, where you were versus where you hope to be now because this has been a lot of strategic thinking and translating that into new design, not only at the presentation layer but at the back-end as well. Now as you deploy, there is significant investment made to get this right. So we acknowledge that again. It's not only performance. It's not only good, sound ergonomics but it is also persuasive design. We want to ensure that there will be these measures of success and one of those of course, is conversion and as we transition, I suggest that it's not only conversion at one point. In fact, conversion is a process. So we see three points of conversion over here. The notion of the initial conversion, the servicing and then engaging and we'll be talking moving forward, about the notion of advocacy. Creating advocates not just users who are accepting what you are providing. And I think through these points of conversion we talk about, you can think of your scenario of initial release. It was competitive offer, it was your legacy offer, now there's a new offer and as you're rolling out, it's really about acquisition - about the transition of existing users to come onto the new platform and hopefully those who are not, to come over.

Eileen Gilfedder: Right, also converting those users who are not using the platform to our new – to the new one.

Jerome Nadel: So it's that first point of conversion and again, persuasive, emotive, trustworthy that when I come, I see value, I understand how it works. We move forward from there and it's the continuation of servicing. We're now again in the notion of I've arrived, I'm informed, I'm engaging and I'm continuing to convert. Service becomes fundamental here. The system must be as we know, responsive, reliable, consistent and predictable. It needs to support the tasks I'm trying to perform. Then we move up and you see the parallels from satisfaction to loyalty to wallet share that there's in fact, a monetization associated with this multiple points of conversion where now I'm engaged. This is the place that I come. It's enabling not only a set of core tasks but it is that aggregative portal that enables me to do more and more of my job. So you're not only looking if you will at wallet share, you're looking at mind share and desktop share as well.

Eileen Gilfedder: Right and it's not just doing you know, being able to provide a service that allows you to do more and more with it. It actually has to make you better at what you do. It has to give in our case, the advisor you know, a much easier way of getting to the information that they need on a regular basis to support their clients. So it's really not just the one user who you are engaging, it's that user and the people that they are servicing you know beyond what they're looking at on your offering.

Jerome Nadel: Which really gets once again to the totality of user experience because if you look at it more eco-systemically, it's bigger than just how can the broker perform transactions on this platform? It is how does it enable the totality of the work you're trying to perform?

Eileen Gilfedder: Right, right. How does it enable the broker to really provide his customer with a much more comprehensive view of their assets and their portfolio and how that advisor is servicing that customer you know with, with those things that are most important to him – assets, wealth etc.

Jerome Nadel: Exactly. Relevance and we'll talk about that as we move forward as well. A couple more of introductory slides over here to get us settled into the point of hearing more about the world of PFPC as part of PNC and then looking at some of the case study. So managing customer experience, again, in a little bit of survey data over here and it really speaks to the notion of creating advocates – advocacy and it suggests that advocates spend more time, remain customers longer, refer new customers. And it's interesting, this was a study done primarily on banking but note, and we see this very much in the financial space that it's difficult to differentiate when you look at mutual funds – what does one organization provide in terms of their fund set versus another? Or even from the back-end processing perspective. As you provide the service, what is the difference? And notice from the bar chart you see over here that the products and the quality of the products seem less relevant than the quality of service which I think is really shifting perspective. Executives are beginning to acknowledge that the soft things like brand and experience are really the differentiators that make one organization more market effective and successful than another organization and I think part of the kind of revelation that's come on through this collaboration - through your redesign of AdvisorCentral® is just that. That it's not about creating a new tool to enable your – your transactions. It's really about shifting the brand and priority on that.

Eileen Gilfedder: It's actually – we came to find out that it's actually enabling the brand. The brand is much more important than people give it credit for and I mean, it really begins to shape what clients, prospects, those that may not be that familiar with you actually begin to perceive of you in terms of, you know, how you do what you do and what the level of service is that you deliver.

Jerome Nadel: And we'll speak about this more later but I know in fact, we've supported some of the outrage that you've had around the story behind how you've gotten from you were to where you are. You needed to set expectations because one of the things you'll hear is that there was an outright acquisition of this entity to bring it into the PFPC family so this was strategic not only in our new build but acquisition funding and its efforts etc. It's really all about fortifying the brand and the overall proposition. In close on these introductory slides, this is perhaps more investor-centric. We spoke about more of this a little bit before but it's very relevant in these spaces where account-centricity and the notion of authentication, the benefit in terms of the more you know, so we've heard over and over again in the investment financial space that if you look at the classical formulaic model, one invests on a four-step sequence. They research, they analyze, they transact and then they monitor the transaction. But I suggest with that line below from prospect to convert to account holder, that that in fact, is not the case. That first time user is going to come in and perhaps even off a tip, research, analyze, transact but once they're an account holder, the way you interact with them should be much different and leverage what you know. The more you know about what I have, the more you can offer contextually relevant, actionable information to me and what we have acknowledged before speaking on this slide is that of course this is relevant for the account holder himself. For the client who has a portfolio with a set of accounts and a set of funds in those accounts but it's also relevant for the financial advisor as well.

Eileen Gilfedder: That's right and actually; the importance of what you know becomes that much more important. It's not anymore just about providing data or information, it's actually about being able to provide a tool that can take that information and give the advisor in this case, more information about what they have than they actually see on the screen.

Jerome Nadel: And as we now move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, more to come on that in future webcasts. The semantic web is offering new ways to do this better and that some of the attributes of the design that you see here I think, embrace at a niascent level some of the ideas that we'll see really manifest in the world of Web 3.0. So let's move over. Eileen's done a great job providing a high-level primmer into the world of PFPC. Take it away!

Eileen Gilfedder: Thanks Jerome. So, PFPC –Who are we? We are actually part of the PNC Financial Services Group who is into retail, corporate and institutional banking lines of business. They also are asset managers in that they run and manage mutual funds and they also are one of the largest companies that provide global fund processing, and that is where PFPC actually comes into play. We are the mutual fund processing e-arm of PNC Financial Services. We are one of the largest providers of mutual funds transfer agency, fund accounting and fund administration services to both domestic and international fund managers and we also supply record-keeping services for distributors so asset managers, mutual fund companies, managed account sponsors, hedge fund providers, alternative investment managers and distributors represent broker dealers and those individual advisors who sell the asset management products. So today, our focus is going to be around our acquisition and evolution of the AdvisorCentral® products which is really sort of the first phase in our overall strategy of looking at asset managers and distributors and their financial advisors and how the three of them are really trying to accomplish the same goals and how we as a financial services provider are positioned to hopefully do that for our clients and those clients of our clients. Overall, we service about $2.5 trillion in assets and it's represented by about 72 million shareholder accounts.

Jerome Nadel: Those are some rather astronomical numbers at the bottom over here so you know again, simplifying this tool at the level that non-financial experts might understand shows it's a large market that your serve with different types of players.

Eileen Gilfedder: That's right. So you know, for those of you who own mutual funds on the asset manager side, we are the organization that creates the statements, processes the transactions, manages the call centers that service those accounts and on the distributor side, if you are a client or a broker dealer, we run support systems that allow broker dealers to run those records on their side and be more effective in what they do in terms of holding those accounts on your behalf.

Jerome Nadel: Excellent.

Eileen Gilfedder: So in today's conversation, we're really focused on the transfer line of business. In the early 2000s, we participated with a group of mutual fund companies that actually partnered to create a centralized self-service portal designed to provide those advisors that sell me full term products a single place to go look at their account positions and really be positioned to service their accounts. We are trying to support our mutual fund companies, the fund companies are trying to support their advisors, the advisors are trying to support their investors and yet they're all coming back to a single source of data which we're using as a base of our AdvisorCentral® offering to make that data available so that all those constituents can be served. We had made a decision that even though we were partnered with a group of very strong fund companies in this partnership, that in order to really maximize the potential where we thought the AdvisorCentral® could go, that we needed to acquire and really take on the direction of that portal as a single entity and at the same time, the other thing that sort of influenced our decision that way was on the distributors' side of the business, on the broker dealer side of the business, there were really three things happening that were changing the dynamics of how distributors interacted with mutual fund companies. Advisors were moving towards a more independent model where typically you had broker dealers, advisors associated with large firms, the large firms provided the entire infrastructure to support those advisors which is great in terms of being able to run your business but there also were constraints on that. So there was a movement in the industry to allow advisors to become more independent to kind of build their own business but still retain some of that support from the broker dealer at the firm level. The regulatory compliance environment changed pretty significantly due to several situations that most people are probably aware of and the regulatory scrutiny with the regulatory bodies became much more restrictive on advisors, broker dealers and mutual fund companies. So now there was much more work that needed to be done on all those levels to ensure those compliance guidelines were being met and lastly, broker dealers at the firm level were really looking at how they supported their clients who owned and you know, bought and sold mutual funds and they were looking to retain more control over the customer's positions so that they could provide the level of service that they believe needed to be delivered to those customers and they are migrating towards a pretty significant change in how they record keep those positions. So when we looked at what was going on in the industry from that perspective and we thought about what AdvisorCentral® could really do in that space, we made the decision to acquire the product and that really was what has kicked off this entire effort.

Jerome Nadel: So to bring that back, we hear the language for again, the less experts in the space of the distributor - maybe help us with whom our distributors are.

Eileen Gilfedder: Sure, who our distributors are anyone from your Merrill-Lynch to Citi to the independent firms to the LPL Financial Services where advisors are able to run their own business but the LPL hold their licenses so it really runs the gamut from the largest of the large to the smallest of the small all providing you know, financial planning, wealth management, selling a whole host of different types of investment products to individual shareholders.

Jerome Nadel: Which is going to come to another theme, which is the notion of aggregation in a moment because as financial advisors, I want to be able to serve my investor regardless of the funds that they hold in their multiple accounts.

Eileen Gilfedder: That's right. Right because their every investor you know, what you read about every day-every investor has different investment needs and the number of options now available to advisors to sell to their investors is just so diverse and so varied that the systems that have to support all that you know, are in the range of big behemoth mainframes to small laptop applications if you will, and the challenge is to bring all that information together in a way that actually makes sense.

Jerome Nadel: And you can imagine, those in the interface design space you know, a lot of ALT+Tabbing on the Windows paradigm as I might have various sites that enable me to do transactions for given funds so the intent once again over here and the spirit of aggregation was "bring it all together so it becomes a one-stop shop" so we're supporting everybody and we can do more and you make more out of that.

Eileen Gilfedder: That's right. Let's go back. (Smiles)

Jerome Nadel: Yeah, let's go back.

Eileen Gilfedder: So, to that point, advisors are challenged everyday to accomplish all these things that you see here, they're trying to manage their client base, they're trying to make sure all the documentation is in order – in good order in case they're audited, they're trying to provide everything from transaction capabilities to their customers to very comprehensible planning you know, that might cut across all generations. Everything now from healthcare planning to retirement planning to college planning to you know, starting from when children are born to you know, really planning for your end time, I guess.

Jerome Nadel: (Laughs)

Eileen Gilfedder: So in addition to this, the advisors are also trying to grow their business, right? They have to increase their client base, increase assets under management, deliver high quality service in order to remain relevant to their customers so when you combine all of these daily things that have to happen plus their business goals are becoming bigger, better, managing more assets, it almost becomes impossible to imagine going to multiple sources to pull all this information together to support those customers and that's where the self-serve aggregation portals play an important role in allowing advisors to actually do what they need to do and to provide the service that their investors - their customers now expect them to provide.

Jerome Nadel: Well said.

Eileen Gilfedder: So, so there are so many different investment options that are available to individual investors now sold through advisors that when you look at all of these different options and you recognize that they are all record-kept on different kinds of systems and the terminology that these systems may use and the data elements that these applications may use to quantify these investment options – the challenge to bring that all together so that it actually makes sense on an individual screen for example, is extremely complex. So the solution, I guess it sounds simple, is to create a single point of access where the advisor or the assistant can go and know that the information is going to be accurate, up-to-date, accessible. Create customized views of their customers' positions whether at the individual level, at the portfolio level, at the household level, you know, retirement assets, non-retirement assets – and provide that to the advisor so that they can very simply answer a customer's questions or create a picture of what those assets look for that customer is certainly a challenge. The clients are interested in their - what their book of business looks like. They want to know you know, are they increasing their wealth every day and the advisor is also interested in what his book of business looks like. So it's not just presenting John Smith's positions, you know, Mary Jones as the advisor for a hundred different clients wants to know what her book of business looks like too. So aggregation portals really need to serve all purposes.

Jerome Nadel: And we'll be speaking in terms of object hierarchy as we forward or as my esteemed colleague, Susan Weinschenk likes to speak to the idea of nouns and verbs and there's a hierarchy of nouns over here. So we'll be thinking of the client with their portfolio of multiple accounts down to the detail of funds within a given account wherefore the broker – the financial advisor is sitting on top of the client and they want their own view. So how do we pivot all of these views? It seems like a daunting complex task but I like, on this slide that you've prepared, that this needs to be done simply - simply and elegantly. So let's transition and again, it's not so much about the design over here but really the approach that led to the design and it will be exciting to hear at the end if you've just deployed and it's been a Beta release process kind of you know, holding it back a bit. Well, we'll walk through some of the sequence that we went through that again reinforces that user experience design is not just about going out to end users and understanding what they need and do but focusing first on an organizational strategy and I think that that's the platform that Eileen did a great job sharing that there was an approach, there was a need on the market to move PFPC forward and the user experience in this product offering was going to support that. So we move forward and talk about user experience design in practice and highlight from a forthcoming framework of Schaffer-Weinschenk, the notion that good design begins with strategy. Strategy, assessment, research, design, validation and finally institutionalization and that will be the frame that we'll use to walk through this given case study. We often say that good design is informed and validated and that informed phase in that first block really speaks to let's make sure we're collectively clear on the success criteria are strategically, that we have any kind of measurable metrics associated with that, we've assessed what exists against the market and we've got out and done our end user research. We speak of that in terms of the contract for design and then we move on from what we know from that information foundation and translate that into structural and visual design. That is then brought back to end users to be validated and iterated based on what we've learned and ultimately that is documented, built, deployed. And as we like to say in the spirit of institutionalization, never lose your corporate memory and we're excited that it wasn't just an initiative over here of building the design and deploying it but trying to start to acquire a repository of user centric knowledge. Who are our users? What do we know? What are the standards? How do we move forward?

Eileen Gilfedder: Right. And not only for the you know, the core group that's involved with this but really for our organization to take that to you know, obviously marketing people but to our training people, to our IT organization – everyone from a business analyst to the developers so that "everyone is really brought into the scene" approach.

Jerome Nadel: Absolutely. So from the case study here again, we'll begin with what did we learn? How did it translate into structural design? And then a little bit of you know, the institutionalization, in conclusion. So we'll walk through the five-course steps plus institutionalization, share this sequence, again, I encourage you to be submitting questions for both Eileen and myself which we hope to have some dialogue with you at the end of the webcast over here. So back to the beginning of strategy here that there was a theme and a mention of the notion of aggregation that's really one aspect but again, in lay-speak, I am a given investor who has one or more brokers and the broker might be trying to get all of my business because I have multiple accounts, perhaps multiple fund companies I've interacted with. What I would like as an investor is to say, when I speak with my broker, "Let me know how I am doing in total." I want you to be able to go across the various things that I own because I care less about the back-end systems that they reside on or who they're from necessarily. I want it all brought together and so the notion of aggregation is somewhat kind of both, metaphorical and literal. Aggregation is a technical capability to aggregate this data from various places. It's almost conceptual as well as it says the broker really needs a unified framework to look again at their clients – at the portfolio of the client, various accounts within the portfolio down to a fund and transaction detail. And we see the progression of this down and up the overall hierarchy and the challenge to us in getting ahead of ourselves here, is we said this can be very complex and it's not just the broker as the user. We'll talk about the back-office transaction processors who don't think about clients. They think about transactions.

Eileen Gilfedder: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: So there are various entities in these object hierarchies. How do we give each user the view that they need? And how does that fit in with the strategy that Eileen was sharing with you that was really market critical for PFPC? Strategy then assessment and the starting point of course, is to say let's look against best practice at what we have. We started out with the existing site and we could share all the detail but again, this is a kind of high-level sequence through. Of course, against best practice, there were some opportunities.

Eileen Gilfedder: Opportunities, that's right.

Jerome Nadel: Opportunities that were presented in terms of improvement and you see you know, across a couple of examples over here. Where do I start? Problematic layout in terms of a lot of eclectic information aggregated without any workflow organization and even in terms of task completion, in terms of number of steps and the like, things were excessively laborious to get through and there were also issues of overall systems performance which I know your overall system architects spent a lot of time re-architecting the back-end to enable a lot of the interface aspects that we were advocating. In this case, we speak a lot you know, my colleague Phil Goddard spends a lot of time around metrics in terms of review. And we didn't take a very metric based approach but that's something to entertain here. Once you've got the KPIs in place for your strategy and you're beginning the assessment, think about the measurable metrics associated with the critique and look for continuous improvement as you move forward. We then went out and did end user research and note that it wasn't exhaustive, it wasn't academic, we spoke about up-front and we said we're going to be pragmatic. Again, there is a risk because if we only look at a little, we might try to make inferences off the small end and those of you in the financial space, I know, appreciate the challenge of getting anyone in the financial eco-system to participate in this type of study.

Eileen Gilfedder: Right. Right, the challenge of getting a commitment of spending more than 5 minutes to you know, actually get in some detailed conversation and review of how they do their job every day. Whether there's a financial planner or a back-office person who's trying to get through you know, the 17 exceptions he has in front of him, you know, most people are not willing or able to give up that time.

Jerome Nadel: Absolutely. And here again, you see 19 users and 4 core roles so dividing that out and went to multiple locations as well. Interestingly what came back for those of you in the interface design space, we think of personas. We think of roles and rules. We think of a portal. So when I authenticate, there are various roles that we can define. The question that came back first is, does this imply that we're going to have multiple systems and multiple interfaces? And I like the notion of a cube where inside you've got the application logic and it has the various objects with their affinity and hierarchy mapped inside the cube and all we're doing in effective portal design is displaying the face of the cube that corresponds to any given role. So if I'm a financial planner, I need the objects presented to me contextually in a way that makes sense to the things that I do. If I'm the back-office processor, I'm thinking again, more in terms of transactions and really less about the client or their broker. That's a logical starting point for me. So we need a discontextual map on the inside and we're able to elegantly display that almost as the plane or face of that given cube.

Eileen Gilfedder: Right, so the good thing is, the basic data elements that all user roles are looking for are the same. We can get that information from multiple sources but the basic data though, was the same. The challenge was how do we take that data and make it applicable and valuable to the 4 different roles who're really trying to accomplish 4 different things. And it you know, it was eye-opening for many of our folks in the technical team. Here we were thinking that we were going to go through this major screen design and use the guts of the architecture and lo! And behold! The architecture had to be revamped to support supplying data for the 4 different roles. We could end up with one product and meet all those needs.

Jerome Nadel: This is music to my ears to hear this kind of feedback because again, at the beginning, it was very daunting. What does it mean from a build perspective and you were great with providing us intimacy with the data team to go back and forth to make sure that we would be able to implement these concepts. But when we shifted the paradigm to say it's really about these connected objects, and we just need to determine by role, what if the face of that cube – plane of that cube then we were able to quickly think in terms of dynamic interfaces and rendering the views that correspond efficiently with that user type. So out of the strategy success criteria, the assessment and the end user research, we began structural design. Typically it was the wireframes that you see over here and it was a snapshot of a set of wireframes. This is focused more on the advisor over here and how they authenticate and then navigate down to a given client and details of their overall portfolio. We in fact, took this structural design, collaborated with the team, made sure that it was of course, technically feasible which there was a lot of back and forth on and that there was a general buy-in for that framework. Then we translated that into the beginning of visual design and as typical, we shared a couple of options, iterated between the two to come up with some hybrid and selected that, applied that treatment to all of the wireframes and that became the pre-final design. We're not done of course, because there's a lot to learn by exposing this to end users and ensuring that they can and would – back to the performance and persuasion side, use this to complete tasks and that was exciting from the validation perspective and again, there was also a market dynamic over here. PFPC is not the only player in this space. Again, it's often said if you have no competition, there is no market. So when this case again, it was looking at increasing brand awareness and market position and there was some direct competition. We went out to end users to perform this validation exercise and you're seeing some of the anecdotes that came in back. The research level, I assure you, we heard let's say some complaints.

Eileen Gilfedder: Yeah.

Jerome Nadel: And we were the ear for these people to vent to say, "Please bring back what we're dissatisfied with."

Eileen Gilfedder: Yeah.

Jerome Nadel: And again, without any solicitation or suggestion of positive feedback when we came back with the evolving prototype, the feedback that we received and their ability to perform core tasks was radically different which brought together to the whole team not only about confidence of the design moving forward but that the process had yielded something that was rational. That it made sense and I think, the story was really first expose internally and that helped be captured is something that ought to be shared externally as well.

Eileen Gilfedder: Jerome, I think we hit on one of the key things relative to the reaction as we brought this to the development team. You know, it's one thing for business people to say, "Here's what we want to deliver" and by us, I mean on the advice of Jerome and his team of getting the developers involved right up front, they were brought into doing something that would make the user experience better. And it was a collaborative effort rather than a challenge internally, "Here's what the business wants and here's what the IT folks are actually going to be able to do" so that was a really important step in this whole process to have that you know, part of the process from the very, very start.

Jerome Nadel: Yeah, I can't stress that enough. The whole rational objective framework of informed and validated design puts everybody at peace and gives confidence that you're moving in the right way. And we felt that, that at the beginning, there was a lot of anxiety.

Eileen Gilfedder: How can we do this?

Jerome Nadel: That how can we do this and that work to get done and the end result how it's embraced in the market? So we came back to the final design and of course, as we always do, we learned a lot in validation. We had not absolutely nailed everything right away. That's the essence of this approach of user experience, user centered, success centered design and you see some of the final designs over here but what's exciting is we didn't just come to design and the documentation of that design. PFPC said that in the spirit of that sixth step of institutionalization, let's leverage that with some core standards, with prototyping environment, with methodology so this – and maybe you want to speak to the fact that AdvisorCentral® within PFPC, within PNC Financial is really one vertical and in the eco-system of an advisor were others who were in the financial space who have other offers and services that benefit the framework as well.

Eileen Gilfedder: Right, I think that more – that the most important proofs of progress that we made as an organization was through this process, identifying and recognizing that as we approached other products and services we offer, that this idea of standardizing not only how we approach the process but how we standardize the design and the back and forth of design, testing it with some users and working with our internal folks really has helped the organization become much more cohesive in terms of when we look at other products that we offer. I think that the ongoing effect of trying to institutionalize it and it was definitely a challenge to get people bought into the concept. Many people think and many people you know, in our senior team say, "Let's design the screens. We'll make it look better. We'll do what we need to do and everyone will be happy." Well you know, it's not quite that simple. Now we have a program where all the right people are going through standardized training about what all this means and it's been – it's been great because they come now to our development project actually it's you know, in their mind and it really has just helped the whole process.

Jerome Nadel: Let's transition over.

Eileen Gilfedder: Sure.

Jerome Nadel: So what are the trends in financial markets here and again, Eileen has put together a set of slides that walk through your perspective but one that I think that goes beyond the wall and the firewall of PFPC so I'll hand it back to you again.

Eileen Gilfedder: So I talked a little bit in the beginning about how on the distributor's side, the environment is really changing and has changed, how broker dealers distribute asset management products but what we have come to recognize as we have clients on both the manufacturer's side and the distributor's side, is that they really have some very common goals. They're all looking to raise and retain assets. They're all looking to make sure that they have the best advisors and asset managers and mutual fund companies actually help support distributors in keeping those advisors with that firm because those advisors are the primary selling avenue of the asset managers to get their product out. So advisors rely on mutual fund companies to help them be more productive for their products and in general, if the advisors are more productive, right, they are accomplishing their goal of building their business. Both sides of the buy-sell dynamic have compliance and surveillance requirements now that have really brought the two of these together. They all need to know the customer as the same entity. Broker dealer needs to know the customer and the mutual fund now – the mutual fund companies have responsibilities about knowing that same customer. If those two organizations or those two sides of the business cannot communicate with each other in terms of who their customer is, you know we have this disparity and that creates compliance issues. We talked a little about brand and reputation. You know, with everything that's been in the news of late, your brand and your reputation is really key to your success. And ultimately, it boils down to, from an operations back-office perspective, you can only grow if you become more efficient at what you do and you have to be able to reduce your expenses as you grow. So when we look at aggregation portals and the role that our service provider can play, our ability is to bring all of this information together for those various constituents to give advisors access to information quickly so that they can demonstrate to their clients that they're managing their book of business at the same time allowing an operations person to go in and execute a trade without having to being bothered of looking at portfolios, household accountants and customer's value – put both of them in a position where they accomplish what they need to accomplish and an organization like PFPC can actually play that role to help both sides be better at what they do in this space.

Jerome Nadel: It sounds like a business model. We're speaking in a context of user experience here.

Eileen Gilfedder: So aggregation in portals, right, today they support a number of different needs. They bring together diverse investment options. They let advisors access all of their mutual fund options regardless of what record-keeping systems they might be housed on. They allow advisors to process transactions on the customer's behalf. They often provide business-building tools specific to individual fund companies or in general. They are moving towards more support in the compliance regulatory world. Supplying aspects of wealth reporting, it's not just managing a fund or stock anymore, it's taking all of those investment options and creating a wealth picture for the client. So these are the functions that they perform today but aggregation portals are just in the infancy stages. Real opportunities are just beginning to present themselves because although the access to all of this information is critically important to advisors, back offices and fund companies to let them do what they do, it really is just showing itself to be the basic building block of what this space is looking for. As these portals continue to evolve, the opportunity is to take all of this information, to take all this data and actually create value in the data to the advisor so it's not just presenting stand-alone information to them. It's taking that information and making it valuable to the advisor so that they are in a position to actually grow their business. So Jerome had asked that you know, we kind of reflect back on what we learned as we got into this effort and you know, the thing that struck me was that what our organization came to realize was what the user experience is not. It's not how their user interface looks, it's not how you navigate from screen to screen, it's not figuring out the best way to present the data and information and it's not about how quickly the information is returned when the user makes a request. It is all of those things but really it is much more than that and it is really taking all of that data, integrating it to create value for the user, identifying the data that is valuable and taking that data and making it available to them so that they can actually make good decisions for their businesses and do the right thing for their customers with all that information. So you know Jerome mentioned a couple of minutes ago that we just recently launched our new product. So a week and a half ago, we rolled out AdvisorCentral® in its entirety to the entire user base. We went through a process where we had identified some Beta users and rolled out the application to a small group of users at the advisor level, the firm level and at the fund company level and that was extremely beneficial to us to really tweak a couple of things that weren't working exactly as the user population would expect. We had the opportunity to make those changes, work with our clients to make sure they understood why we were going through the slow roll-out and then you know, we actually are very excited about the response that we've gotten in the last week and a half. Reaction has been very positive and really, we're excited really that now this is really the starting point for, you know, 5 or 6 things we want to do from a strategic perspective in this space.

Jerome Nadel: And again, the story is even more compelling to share some of the detail in fact, by the way, I guess we're going to transition over to some questions at this point and I encourage you to submit more of this. Some great questions have already come in. They're being handed over to me so Eileen, get ready, here we go.

Eileen Gilfedder: Okay.

Jerome Nadel: Note that you know in what you were suggesting before; the formation of this notion of AdvisorCentral® was a joint partnership that is co-funded by two fund companies and PFPC. That the idea was that there is an opportunity in the market that's mutually beneficial (no pun intended) for the two fund companies as well as PFPC.

Eileen Gilfedder: Yeah.

Jerome Nadel: With that, at the end of last year – beginning of this...

Eileen Gilfedder: December of 2006, the acquisition was completed.

Jerome Nadel: Time flies.

Eileen Gilfedder: Right. Beginning of 2007 was when we kicked off the project internally, got you folks engaged to help us and really went all up through 2007 with the validation you know, your components...

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS:-

Jerome Nadel: And we'll talk more about that because in fact the first question is how long did it take to go through each phase of the entire redesign? And I could speak to that so I've got my years mixed up here so it was the beginning of 2007 coming in but you had said this wasn't just two existing customers. "Hey, PFPC has just committed with the re-launch of our given platform." It was "we have made an investment, we have committed to this fundamental acquisition" and you set expectations on the market. And you needed to manage the marketing splash associated with the acquisition but also manage the expectations of when you were going to release and the value that it would bring.

Eileen Gilfedder: The release...that's right.

Jerome Nadel: And you also had to bring not just a new design but the notion of aggregation that we spoke to before.

Eileen Gilfedder: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: So this was a little bit organic in that way because we needed to work both tactically and strategically but with that, these types of redesigns – the 6 steps that I spoke to – from strategy, to assessment, to research, to design, to validation and then into institutionalization is typically about a 12-week process and we pretty much stayed on agenda associated with core steps but there was a lot of build associated with that...

Eileen Gilfedder: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: And a lot of market communications from you as well.

Eileen Gilfedder: That's right. As that piece was going on you know, internally we're looking at the development effort around that and we didn't wait until the 12-weeks was done. We definitely had some direction to go with right away, right, but our development effort took a good ten months. Our QA and testing effort, well it happened iteratively through the process, probably all in it was a good 3 months. Our Beta – our Beta release to the market, we actually let go for about 5 weeks. We thought that was sufficient. So the entire process was almost 14 months in the making.

Jerome Nadel: But with that communication at some level the whole way along in sharing the story...

Eileen Gilfedder: Right.

Jerome Nadel: We were personally involved in it without communication.

Eileen Gilfedder: Right, communication with our clients, keeping them updated of course, with the project, communication with the market, communication with prospects, communication with the users.

Jerome Nadel: Next question, keep them coming. What is your approach to designing interface and architecture specifically for advisors? What were their specific needs that you addressed? So maybe I'll begin and then we'll go back and forth on this.

Eileen Gilfedder: Sure.

Jerome Nadel: Again I'll encourage, remember in this case we weren't only focusing on advisors. There were 4 different core roles. Regardless, even if it were just the advisor, take any eco-systemic view. Often systems are designed saying, what do we offer and how will it be used? What are the requirements for it? We think it's very important to understand how does what you offer fit in to the thing they do? That is the whole notion that this is elective and there are other tools that can be provided. And to close on that theme what we've architecturally wanted to understand was - what are the objects that they interact with and in what given hierarchical orientation? Because if you look at the design in more detail, it really exposes in a very flat way, multiple levels of hierarchy. I am an advisor. I have a client. My client has a portfolio. That portfolio has one or more accounts. Those accounts have funds that all have transactions. How do I render that in a coherent way? Flipped like a pivot table, if I am back-office, I focus on transactions and the relationship, although transaction is connected to a fund that's connected to an account and a client and ultimately a broker, it's reversed in the other way.

Eileen Gilfedder: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: So step back. Look at everything. Think big would be the point that I would share.

Eileen Gilfedder: Alright. And from the aspect of what specific needs were we trying to address, we knew through feedback from our clients and from our service center and from our work that Jerome and his team did that there were a couple of core things that we had to accomplish. Advisors, because of the complexity of mutual funds and annuities and some new products that are being offered, the information comes from multiple old legacy mainframe systems. The challenge to bring that from multiple systems to a single view depending upon how the account is held really is the first priority. The advisor wants to know that mutual fund account A – you know here's the balance and here's the transactions that happened. Mutual fund account B which is with a different mutual fund company – here's the balance, here are the positions, here's the dividend paid. You take all that information, held in all different places – a retirement account, an IRA account and possibly a 401K account, how do you make that look as a single portfolio for that customer? So that was the first thing we were trying to address. Then, as important, making sure that the access to that information was as short a path as possible and that the site was reliable and up you know, 23/7.

Jerome Nadel: And again, there is a lot of data. (Laughs) Size matters so the more you aggregate, the more challenging it could be to find what you're looking for and make it coherent. And again, we acknowledge that this needed to be scaled in a way that wasn't just for the initial roll-out but it was getting larger and larger. Eileen, for you over here. Eileen, what was the reason that HFI used to persuade you that this was the right approach and what was the discussion you had at the executive level to get buy-in for such a comprehensive project?

Eileen Gilfedder: That's a – that's a good question. Well, when they came in to present their – their view of how to go about this, I think the thing that really waved the decision was the very methodical way that they were going to go about sort of the preliminary exercise to get us to the point where we can make a decision – do we want to go with HFI or not? We - Jerome actually recommended that we chunk-up the engagement to you know, be very distinct in terms of components you know, that would fall sequentially. We had the option at any point to back out and as we got through each of the components, we realized just how valuable this approach was and that quite honestly, left to our own devices, we would not have been able to accomplish what we had accomplished. You know, from a senior management perspective, I think the thing that swayed them, it was a – it was a – honestly it was a couple of weeks getting with the fact that they - they had a lot of experience in financial services and just the overall approach seemed to fit in with what PNC and PFPC were looking to accomplish. I think we also liked the fact that we could opt out you know, it was like a nice little safety net.

Jerome Nadel: I guess you know metaphorically, back to the multiple points of conversion, we were building advocacy along the way.

(Laughter)

Jerome Nadel: It's all relevant in everything we do. Good question here. Is there any quantitative research planned for assessing the performance success of the new design versus at least a sampling of PFPC's competitors?

Eileen Gilfedder: We are, it's a little bit early you know, we've been a week and a half – two weeks into this but we do have ways of assessing exactly how we're doing. Before we acquired AdvisorCentral®, we were definitely in a second tier position from the market perspective relative to our competitors. We knew that it affected some sales decisions; it affected relationships with clients so we knew the challenge that we had. We believe that as we move forward, the adoption rate as it, and hopefully it will grow, and will be one of the indicators related to you know how we're doing versus the competition. We also are expecting that the issue that we had that the sort of the weakness that we had in the market place and in this space will go away as we go through you know, new prospects of sales efforts. I can almost call that quantitative but that is how we'll gauge if we've been successful.

Jerome Nadel: Excellent. I'm just previewing, I should say, the questions as they come in and we've got some good questions over her. We're going to have to limit it. I have a set that have come in. Keep them coming though. When we can perhaps respond the site, we'll probably talk about that post webcast. Can you please advise us on the best approach in writing the specification documentation of user experience? Are there a set of guidelines UI designers need to follow in their spec? Are there available spec templates that you can suggest reviewing? So maybe speak a little bit about Usability Central and ...

Eileen Gilfedder: Sure. One of the components of the engagement with HFI actually involved just that. We – we definitely had some concerns in the beginning about our business analyst and our documentation folks and even our developers really grasping the concepts that were being discussed in the process. Though one of the options that we had was to work with Jerome and his folks and have them provide for us UI guidelines based upon design recommendations that were finally made. So when the engagement was coming to an end, we had agreed upon, you know the general concepts of the design and where we wanted to take the screens, if you will, with that came templates that kept us on track. So there wasn't a ton of opportunity for you know the BSAs and the documentation and the development people to first kind of do their own thing and that was a good thing because it kept us – it kept us very much on track.

Jerome Nadel: And what was interesting and appropriate for this design again, it was all about object affinity and hierarchy, so we were able to demonstrate a lot of lists and list management filtering and list in detail so we were able to from a template perspective establish the core parts and how they go together even with a dynamic prototyping tool, within this usability central repository.

Eileen Gilfedder: I think the other significant benefit which is hard to quantify but developers have their own philosophy often about how things should be. (Laughs) And you can have two developers working on the same project and have slightly different approaches in terms of how we should get there and this kept everyone on the same page wherein in other efforts, developers kind of often do their own thing sometimes and you don't end up where you want to end up.

Jerome Nadel: (Laughs) And that's part of the influence too and some of the training – there's another question for that. Can you talk about the interplay between structural design and visual design? Another excellent question and note that when we began, we talked about the steps in this user centered design approach that there is the structural then the visual design. And I'll suggest that sometimes visual design is more important than others. Fundamentally, the notion of object hierarchy and taxonomy and information architecture and navigation are all structural. So we like to begin with wires to we make sure that we've got a good taxonomical structure, a good information architecture and navigation schema and often will take just those designs to test but as well, as many of the viewing audience knows, visual design is very important to highlight and make salient various areas of a display. So tell me how this relates to that and I think what went well in the visual design and you'll ultimately accepted and seemed to test well, was not only the persuasive "I like this, I get it" there is an emotive response to it but "I better understand not just to juxtaposition how this relates to that." So visual design is not just visual embellishment. It's also supports understanding how things relate to each other. In a nutshell, what do you think stands out as the best user experience improvement in the eyes of users?

Eileen Gilfedder: Based upon the feedback that we've gotten to date, I think it comes down to two things. The improvements in the navigation and the much shorter paths to get to the information that they're looking for is cited several times over as a significant improvement to the site. The other thing the original site definitely was challenged might seem like a minor thing but in some of it there's coloring and palette selection, if you will, and that has been a significant improvement. It sounds minor but people have commented on that. (Laughs)

Jerome Nadel: But it's an emotive response and again, this self-serve, it's elective. You want to make sure that you're getting that response. Well, we'll probably close on this last question over here. And I'll be coming back with some information about our next webcast to come so stay tuned. What were the challenges you faced in putting all relevant information together in the UI with respect to the different roles? What were the innovative methods/concepts used to implement the complex UI for this product? So again you know it come back, that notion and metaphor of a cube and acknowledging that it's not multiple user interfaces but the spirit of good portal role-based design. Understanding from the day in the life perspective, what are the objects that each role interacts with? And in what hierarchical order? So I think that one of the key themes and this goes cross-vertical. If it's supply chain, if it's workflow management, any systems that are data intensive like this, it's important to understand by role through use-case, how do they interact with the nouns and the verbs? What are the objects that they interact on and what are the relevant actions? And if we've established these, I would argue that good design is efficient design and that takes the least amount of effort to dynamically create.

Eileen Gilfedder: Right.

Jerome Nadel: So we were almost like application architects working as interface architects. Understanding what are the object connections? How do they relate? How do we enable their dynamic rendering? So they're not in fact, disparate interfaces but just a core system that's calling the interface based on the role.

Eileen Gilfedder: And related to that, one of the most significant challenges we faced was when you take the four roles, although they're going after the same information, the way they want the information is different. And from an architectural perspective, one of the key challenges was to figure out a way to make that information available and still have a very acceptable response time. The amount of information is tremendous and depending upon who you are, you know, you could be calling back many, many, many, many accounts which has an effect on response time so for the developers, that was one of the most significant challenges they faced.

Jerome Nadel: And I think just in terms of enabling this collaboration, your development community acknowledging that we were understanding some of the architectural ramifications...

Eileen Gilfedder: Of your recommendations...

Jerome Nadel: Yeah, we were able to go back and forth on that. Eileen, it's been an absolute pleasure having you. Thank you so much for joining us.

Eileen Gilfedder: Thanks Jerome.

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