StreamServe repackages software for financial appeal

Enterprise document presentment (EDP) software vendor StreamServe Inc. released StreamServe Financial Tuesday. The product is a revamping of the company’s existing software designed to appeal to banks, insurance and brokerage companies, according to StreamServe’s head.

“It’s not new software, but a repackaging to include templates specific to the financial industry,” Chris Stone, president and chief executive officer of StreamServe, said in a phone interview Tuesday.

The move continues a transformation of the company begun in April when Stone joined StreamServe. He has rebranded StreamServe as a seller of EDP software, a term coined to convey the conversion of data generated by enterprise applications into a readable, often personalized form either online or in print. The idea is to present a company’s information in any format through any channel, including online and via e-mail.

Specifically targeting the financial services market represents a very good opportunity for StreamServe to grow its customer numbers, according to Ken Chin, research vice president with analyst Gartner.

Stone said he expects StreamServe to come out with other vertical industry-specific software, probably in the first quarter of 2006. Other key industries the company targets are utilities and telecommunications companies, manufacturing and distribution, and retail, so all three areas would be likely candidates for future StreamServe offerings, he added.

The Banco Fonder/Alfred Berg asset management organization in Sweden, a wholly owned subsidiary of Netherlands-based international banking group ABN AMRO Bank NV, has been using StreamServe software since 2002 and is already using StreamServe Financial. The company sees good potential upside in being able to send their customers information in the way they want to receive it, according to Malin Fannberg, acting head of communications with Banco Fonder/Alfred Berg.

“We want to send different information to customers via different channels,” she said in a phone interview Tuesday. “Customers want to receive a fund report by post, but be able to access daily communications about their account by SMS [short message service] or e-mail.” Banco Fonder/Alfred Berg is already working on a number of projects integrating its own software with StreamServe to make this possible, according to Fannberg. “We see a great possibility of cost reduction” in communicating with customers online, she said. Fannberg added that the organization sends out about three billion pieces of paper to its customers each year.

Being able to cut down on the amount of paper a bank mails out to customers will allow the institution to realize not only substantial savings on paper and postage, but also allow the bank to reduce the processes needed to generate the printed documents, analyst Chin said.

More and more organizations in finance and elsewhere are honing in on what Gartner calls “customer-centric communication,” in terms of personalizing account statements, bills and invoices to add in information customers are likely to have an interest in, according to Chin. At this point, it’s less quantifiable what the return on investment (ROI) will be on customer-centric communication, but the ROI related to savings on paper and postage is very tangible, he said.

Surveys suggest that the more services a customer has from a particular financial institution, the more likely they are to stay loyal to that firm, according to Stone. Account statements are one place where financial institutions can advertise their other services and potentially gain more business if their adverts draw the customers’ attention, he said.