It’s about serving your customers. As an industry, finance has changed substantially in the last two decades. Two decades ago, a bank or an insurance firm may have served the local community. Customer information was mostly paper records. Today, capital flows and transactions are increasingly multinational if not global in nature and financial information is an increasingly volatile commodity. What happens in Hong Kong affects the bottom line in Topeka. Government regulations require increasing transparency, which means more attention to business process. Customer expectations are also on the rise. More and more customers are looking for a single financial services organization that they can trust to provide one-stop-shopping for insurance, banking, trading and other financial services. As a result, financial services organizations are relying more and more on communications technology to keep costs down, information flowing and customer service agile. Whether you provide insurance, banking or trading services — or a combination — your business needs a communications system that cuts costs and complexity at the same time.

Financial services firms face a number of communications challenges.

Increasing costs. Many financial services organizations rely on a number of different data systems to manage their customer records. Multiple technologies and systems often mean high costs to ensure that the systems work together effectively and securely. Your phone system is no different. Offices may be in the next county or across the country, making information sharing difficult. Managing multiple phone systems is expensive, and long distance charges add up quickly. Single repositories of customer information are difficult to develop and costly to keep up-to-date. Interactive Voice Response systems that would enable self-service are often costly and difficult to develop.

Communications security. Keeping customer information secure is a tremendous challenge with today’s increasing number of communications technologies: voice mail, fax, e-mail, Web site data, even instant messaging. Frequent employee collaboration through various parts of your business requires increased communications security. Your communications processes must provide the right information to the right employees in order to protect your clients’ privacy, and limit opportunities for identity theft and fraud. The more employees involved with a given customer, the greater the opportunity for mistakes, delays or breaches in security, and separate systems for phone, fax and e-mail messages provide multiple points for security failure.

Decreasing productivity and efficiency. Being successful in finance is all about efficiency and productivity. Whether your organization provides banking services, trading services, insurance or a combination of financial services, keeping in touch with your customers and co-workers is an important part of being successful. By themselves, older telephone systems simply cannot address the needs of today’s financial services firms.

Objectworld UC Server can help financial services firms meet these challenges.

Communications technology is opening wide a number of doors for financial services firms looking to improve business processes and work more expediently with their customers. A phone system should make it easy for staff to integrate and manage branch offices or teleworkers from the same centralized system. It should make it easy for employees to communicate quickly and securely with clients. And it should allow firms to provide information to clients 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, whether it’s trading information, exchange rates, account status or an insurance quote. With Objectworld, powerful but simple collaboration tools make it easy to put customer service first.

Cut costs while you improve your return. Financial services businesses can eliminate redundant paging services, fax machines and cell phones while improving the flow of communications. Firms can further maximize the investment they’ve already made in their phone systems by deploying Objectworld UC Server Standard Edition™ with their existing PBX or cut long distances charges with Objectworld UC Server™’s VoIP. Both products help customers reduce costs while increasing their service offerings. With Objectworld, your phone system can be a source of revenue.

Secure and centralize the management of your customer communications. Objectworld products provide a single point of administration fully integrated with Microsoft® Windows® and Active Directory®. Your IT employees can manage a single set of policies for security and access, linking your customers and employees. Employees use simple Windows-based software interfaces to manage all electronic messages about a customer in one secure location.

Beat your competitiion with self-service. With Objectworld products, financial services organizations can improve privacy and customer self-service. Provide customers with round-the-clock remote access to information using Objectworld’s Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Fax Server. Provide insurance quotes, trading information or account status based on the latest data. Objectworld’s visual service creation makes connecting an IVR application to any ODBC-enabled database point-and-click.

Link business communications with business process. Objectworld products provide fully-featured Unified Messaging and that makes tracking customer information over time easier and more efficient. Whether it’s fax, e-mail or voice mail messages, information is readily available, all from the same place. With new message alerts, employees can stay on top of critical changes to financial information, wherever they are. Employees access voice mails, e-mails and faxes directly in Microsoft® Outlook® or Lotus® Notes®. They can prioritize and group those messages according to client or levels of urgency.

Extend your phone system with Objectworld UC Server Standard Edition or transition to VoIP with Objectworld UC Server SIP Edition. Objectworld UC Server provides unified messaging, unified communications, notification, voice conferencing, fax capabilities and more. Whether you want to extend your investment in your existing PBX or lower costs by moving to VoIP, Objectworld UC Server can help your business meet its challenges. With Objectworld UC Server, financial services firms can easily manage the telephony and unified communications requirements of multiple office locations, teleworkers and mobile employees from a single software. Objectworld UC Server provides the productivity and administration tools that businesses need to manage the system directly from anywhere in the system.

Protect your investment. Every day, computers are becoming faster and cheaper, and people around the globe are imagining new ways to communicate. Objectworld’s open, software-based approach means that as computers become faster and less expensive, your business will benefit directly in cost-savings. With Objectworld’s certified and supported Connect Partners, businesses can buy and upgrade third-party hardware and applications, like phones, media gateways, and video conferencing hardware and software, as they need to. Objectworld UC Server also provides flexible, secure and cost-effective integration with other phone systems.