National And International Charities Swoop On Z/Yen

Z/Yen has started the year with a swathe of not-for-profit sector wins, including several new charity clients. The Royal National Institute of the Blind, has asked Z/Yen to help them with scenario planning and portfolio analysis – right up Ian and Michael’s street. Plan (until recently known as Plan International) have asked Z/Yen to help examine options for systems replacement. The National Trust has commissioned us to help them with their IS strategy. Ian and Mary both strongly refute the rumours that they were spotted on the National Trust’s BBC2 programme prancing around a nudist beach in Dorset. These new clients, together with several new projects with our long-established national and international charity clients, mean it’s a flying start to 2004.

The National Exchange Of Birmingham

Small and medium-sized enterprises throughout Europe have difficulty raising capital. Advantage West Midlands, one of the nine Regional Development Agencies in England, has been working for some time on a local business exchange (LBX) principally for indigenous small and medium sized companies to gain access to investor capital in the £200K to £5M range. The LBX will offer investors the opportunity to invest in regional companies that meet a set of regulatory and disclosure requirements where all necessary investor protection and market abuse mechanisms are in place. It is an ambitious and worthwhile project that has been gaining support. Z/Yen’s work has been to refine the market proposition, provide strategic advice and help with the development of market operations. Advantage West Midlands is taking a significant step forward to solve a long-running problem and Z/Yen looks forward to LBX’s launch later this year.

An International Cast Of Stars

“Client Intelligence”, one of our Breakfast Seminars on 22 January, attracted so much interest that we will be repeating the event in February. The seminar featured demonstrations from a truly international cast of stars including Michael Jackson (Dr Michael Jackson the chief executive of ShapingTomorrow.com); Barry Solomon who joined us from Illinois to demonstrate InterAction a client relationship management tool; Sebastian Leslie,a Scot who flew in from Prague to demonstrate OneStopHit; Eric Eck, our French colleague, who joined Robert Pay in demonstrating Pitchbuilder; and of course Michael Mainelli who gave a multi-domiciliary demonstration of how PropheZy can help predict client behaviour. There are still places at the repeat event – to be allocated on a “biggest-bribe, best seat” ..... I mean “first come, first served” basis via Mark Yeandle.

Benchmarking To Help Cut Charity Insurance Costs

The devoted reader of Now & Z/Yen (hello Mum) might recall our study of insurance in the not-for-profit sector (Now & Z/Yen, March 2003). That study highlighted lack of information about insurance pricing as a key issue, a finding reinforced by the Home Office Insurance Cover Working Group recently. Never ones to shirk a challenge, we are teaming up with Charity Logistics to develop an insurance renewal benchmark, an online tool which will allow charities to immediately benchmark their insurance costs against their peers. Charities and insurance companies alike should benefit from the increased availability of information, which should also support moves to more collaborative risk and insurance management throughout the sector. Potential participants contact Mary O’Callaghan for more details.

The Power Of Clients

In December the finance team at Z/Yen completed two market surveys of the securities clients of the major broker/dealers. 90 investment managers were interviewed in 11 countries. As part of the survey, clients were asked to rank the performance of the brokers and, for the first time, these rankings have been published (see our website and recent press). As the rankings covered 11 leading brokers, Z/Yen’s “Spinal Tap Heads” wasted little time before quipping about “rankings that go up to 11”. Interviews were carried out by associates James Pitcher (Europe) and Jonathan Davies (USA). Further client surveys will follow covering Foreign Exchange, Derivatives and Hedge Funds.

OneStopHit Have Smart Intelligence

Z/Yen, working with OneStopHit, offer customised client intelligence solutions, ‘Smart Intelligence’, such as competitor news, market research and active monitoring of internet and intranet sites as if they were news feeds. OneStopHit searches predefined sources which can include third party websites. From these, OneStopHit builds ‘channels’ for each client. One major law firm uses OneStopHit to track the European rail industry including not just major news, but regulator websites and company websites. Mark Yeandle should be your first stop if you want to know more about OneStopHit.

Cable & Wireless

Z/Yen recently assisted C&W by delivering customer insights related to the market for IP VPN. Despite the acronym minefield that is the IT industry (IP VPN, MPLS, DSL, VOIP, ATM, IPSec to name but a few) Z/Yen navigated a safe path and enabled C&W to target the most attractive customers based upon the answers to a small number of questions.