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OFM — Online Financial Management — applications are the next step beyond PFM (personal financial management) programs. For community and mid-market banks and credit unions trying to compete with top-5 national institutions, offering an OFM application on their online banking site can be a huge differentiator. According to Digital Insight’s 2nd Annual Online Financial Management survey, 80% of consumers want to manage their own finances online with their financial institution, an increase from 68% in 2008.

At Digital Insight, we define OFM as applications that expand the PFM concept to also include programs for small business owners such as invoicing, payroll, and preparation of legal forms. This is particularly attractive to the nearly 23 million US small businesses that have less than 5 employees and to the 41% of Americans who run a small business in addition to their main job.[1]

Last Thursday afternoon Brad sent out this Basecamp Message to the team:

The ABA commends the FTC for its continuing efforts to protect consumers from
unscrupulous debt relief service providers through enforcement actions, consumer
education initiatives, and the proposed amendment of the TSR. The ABA support using
FTC’s proposed application of its targeted TSR authority to regulate the for-profit
debt settlement industry.
http://bit.ly/1CfrHd

“Safety is not in the Absence of Danger.”

What a profound statement. In light of the saddening events at Fort Hood this is hits very close to home. A soldier deployed to Iraq had to call her husband at Fort Hood, to ensure he was safe. How ironic. It’s even more ironic that I once convinced a friend that it was archaic not to have a bank account and a debit card. How times have changed. Now with the rise in “money mules” and bank scams involving unauthorized account transfers, are our banks any safer than the sock drawer?

The majority of our clients have now converted to the new FedAdvantage systems and from what we’ve seen these systems are a vast improvement over the old DOS-based Fedline terminals in security and ease of use. But one of the most common questions we now get is:

We got a great question from Matt, he attended our last webinar, and I thought it would be great to share his question and Eric Kitchens’ answer. If you have more questions, please send them to us at info@thegarlandgroup.net and we will continue to help!

If you haven’t been to our site in a while I’d suggest you come on back by because it has been refreshed and is looking rather snazzy, in our opinion! The site started to feel a little stale and we wanted to update it to reflect better about who we really are and what we focus on providing to each and every client. We wanted the focus to be on our clients telling our story instead of just us. Nobody likes a braggert, right?! We’d love to hear what you think!

As many of you already know, I’ve been speaking to bankers across the country about the web, especially the new technologies coming out of the Web 2.0 movement and how those technologies can help financial institutions connect better, via the Web, with their customers. It has been a lot of fun discussing the possibilities and some our clients are beginning to try out and even implement some of these technologies. But one topic that keeps coming back as a question are the security issues related to things like blogs, podcasts, and wiki’s. Lots of people show interest in trying these technologies but lose their desire when fears of security and privacy start being discussed.

One part of our consulting business is that we help banks in choosing a new core provider and as part of the process we go through a standard ‘needs analysis’. What surprises me is that we find over and over again that users are fed up with how diffcult it is to navigate these core systems.