PNC Goes Digital First in Marketing to the Tech Savvy

PNC is going after tech-savvy customers with a digital-first money management marketing campaign called #BeTheBoss. The campaign turns traditional brand approaches to marketing on its ear, said Tom Kunz, senior vice president of digital at PNC.

The campaign starts with learning about customers and prospects. The bank has an audience management platform on its Web site that tracks non-personally identifiable information about visitors and develops segments. It adds in data about online shopping habits from various sources and combines it with financial information like investments and credit information and creates a demand management capability.

The bank then goes to online sites, publishers it calls them, and it can articulate what messages it plans to deliver to specific segments. Then it uses response data to see how the campaigns impact business.

Big Data And Mobile Tech To Solve Public Problems Globally

Public agencies, NGOs and non-profit IT organizations are exploring ways to use technology for something other than getting consumers to buy more stuff.

Big data and innovative uses of mobile technology are hot items in the international public sector, according to a story in today’s FT.

The UN’s Global Pulse is using a network of innovation labs to see how data tracking human behavior might improve responses to poverty, disease and humanitarian crises. Sarah Murray who wrote the article, said a trawl of online job sites at the UN and other agencies brings up a lot of openings for information officers, data warehouse experts and data analysts.

arcplan Makes Chaos Comprehensible

arcplan makes its living on the chaos of its customers, is how Dwight deVera, senior vice president, describes the firm’s business.

Financial services firms are a favorite target since they always seem to be acquiring new businesses, meaning they have systems that don’t talk to each other, even if they come from the same vendor. When Bank of America acquired Merrill Lynch, both were running SAP.

“But you can’t consolidate across them. Just because they run the same software doesn’t mean that any of their requirements match. They have thousands of discrete requirements, and some requirements contradict others.” They could try to harmonize the two systems, said deVera, but they would never get the job done.

Dell Accelerates Servers For High Frequency Algo Trading

Dell has developed a speed edge for high frequency traders (HFT). The computer company has created firmware, the Dell Processor Acceleration Technology, for several of its high end Intel-based servers. It allows users to increase the speed of PowerEdge R620, R720 and R720xd servers with the Intel E5-2690 processor by 13 to 31 percent just through downloading a free BIOS update.

…Coming from Dell whose dull gray commodity computers were probably a major impetus behind the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement by users who wanted something more attractive to work on, is something of a surprise, but Barris says Dell is an HFT powerhouse.

Financial Risk Systems — So Nineties. Why Are They Back?

…some firms have found that tactical approaches — doing just enough to meet the reporting requirements — have not been sufficient for increasing regulatory demands or the needs of internal business users.

Apparently risk wasn’t entirely solved during the 1980s and 1990s when big systems went into banks from Algorithmics, SunGard and other major players. SAS recently ranked in the upper right quad of a Chartis report on risk systems, along with Algorithmics, now part of IBM; Moody’s analytics; SunGard and Oracle.

An Austrian bank took the tactical approach to create reports from existing infrastructure, Rogers said by way of example.

“But tactical can mean not necessarily considering all the elements you need. You meet the reporting for your regulator, but you don’t have the long term infrastructure to extend those reports to areas you really want to work on for stress tests, capital planning or overall risk management reporting.”