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Event
Summary
WESTPORT,
Conn., /PRNewswire/ -- Confirming its commitment to lead the e-finance
marketplace into the rapidly emerging wireless marketplace, Financial
Fusion, Inc. announced the formation of its new Web and Wireless Division
along with the launch of its patent-pending Total Wireless product family
- available for immediate implementation.
Financial Fusion's focus on wireless technology will allow financial institutions
to provide consumers and small businesses with seamless access to important
financial information. Consumers can conduct time-sensitive financial
transactions such as funds transfer, bill payment, and stock trading on
a wide range of popular wireless devices including Palm Pilots and other
web-enabled PDAs, cell phones, and pagers. In addition, Total Wireless
delivers personalized stock portfolios, one-to-one messages, news, weather,
and e-commerce features. (Source: Financial Fusion)
Market Impact
Financial Fusion has formed a wireless branch of their operation to provide
financial organizations, such as Old Kent, with full wireless connectivity
for their clients. While Old Kent and Financial Fusion are not the first
to offer wireless e-finance, the venture represents yet another step forward
to the wireless age.
Financial
Fusion offers a pre-packaged wireless solution aimed directly at e-finance.
The package will allow a financial institution's clients access to day
to day banking transactions, as well as to stock trading, quotes, sports,
news and weather. The advent of wireless in the e-finance arena gives
the client control. From this point forward a client can bank anytime,
anywhere, without limitation. (Of course your cell phone will not suddenly
start spurting out cash.)
The
wireless offering will utilize existing physical wireless technology from
Palm Pilot (Palm VII PDA), Nokia, Motorola, Qualcomm, and Ericsonn Wireless
Access Phones (WAP). Financial organizations such as Fidelity Investments
have also offered wireless access via a two-way Research In Motion Pager
and the Palm VII PDA, so what makes Financial Fusion's offering unique?
Simply because Financial Fusion's Stage III Architecture is based on
java objects, eliminating the need to re-code HTML pages for wireless
devices.
In
addition, Financial Fusion's product is entirely removed from the user
interface, regardless of whether the user has a PDA or a WAP, code can
be written once and used across all devices without modification. Due
to Financial Fusion's Java technology, the Stage III Architecture auto-detects
the type of wireless device a client is using and serves multiple wireless
interfaces concurrently. Wireless Interfaces include the Wireless Access
Protocol (WAP), Palm Query Applications (PQA), Short Messaging Standard
(SMS) and Dynamic Hyper Text Markup Language (DHTML) with Wireless Markup
Language (WML) emerging presently.
User
Recommendations
Financial Fusion offers complete wireless functionality with rapid deployment
due to the ubiquity of the Stage III Architecture. Of course, with any
wireless venture, speed of implementation is important, but stability
during rollout is even more so. The worst thing any company could do is
to rush blindly into a wireless venture, simply because users are clamoring
for it. Our advice is to take your time in selection, talk to AT&T and
IBM Global Services in addition to Financial Fusion, not only to gauge
pricing, but also to gauge functionality, speed, and security. Financial
organizations should be concerned with not only the product offerings
from emerging wireless vendors, but also the corporate strategy and financial
viability of these companies.