This post is the third in a series exploring the free example applications that come bundled with OpenText Actuate Information Hub (iHub), Trial Edition. Read part 1 and part 2.
Financial services firms differentiate themselves and build loyalty by providing their customers with in-depth portals for exploring personalized financial data. Many top banks and other providers use OpenText Analytics and Reporting tools to present, analyze, and report on customer data, and the iHub example application we explore in this post showcases just a few of the capabilities at their disposal.
The example application is called SF Wealth. It’s a dashboard with five tabs – Home, My Spending History, My Wealth, Retirement Roadmap, and Portfolio Performance – each of which illustrates different capabilities. When you launch iHub, Trial Edition and open the Examples, click on the SF Wealth image and you’ll see the screen below.
Home
What it is: A landing page – that is, the first screen a high net worth customer might see when logging into a financial institution website.
What to look for: The page presents personalized information about the customer’s portfolio status, progress toward goals, and risk position in snapshot form. Down either side you’ll see links to outside resources of interest to our imaginary customer. In a real-world portal these HTML links could point to offers geared toward the customer’s specific needs and wants, news headlines about companies in the customer’s portfolio, and other relevant information. We’ve included them here to show how seamlessly third-party, outside sources can be incorporated with data that is unique to the customer.
My Spending History
What it is: A dashboard (shown above) that lets a customer explore spending in depth.
What to look for: To see how various aspects of the same data can be presented in different ways, first select the Restaurant category (in the left column) and watch chart immediately to its right; it will show spending on restaurants, color-coded by account. Now Clear the Categories, find Restaurant in the bar chart, and click its bar; you’ll now see details about all of the restaurants where our user spent money. You can also experiment with the Month Range in the selectors and see how all four graphs change.
My Wealth
What it is: A dashboard (shown above) that gives the user multiple ways to gauge progress and performance.
What to look for: The seven elements on this dashboard mostly provide a variety of comparisons. The thermometer at left shows that our user has saved almost $968,000 – a good figure, until you compare it to the user’s $2 million goal. Now check the map in the lower right corner; our user’s savings are above average for Idaho, but below average for Illinois. (Maybe his money would go farther – or he’d feel richer – if he moved.)
Two of the gadgets on this dashboard are interactive. My Account Update lets you get a detailed report on any fund by clicking its name, and My Wealth vs. Market Indices lets you adjust the timeframe of the chart with a click. Lastly – and just for fun – check the world map in the lower center of the dashboard; our imaginary user has travel goals and is measuring a travel fund against those goals.
Retirement Roadmap
What it is: An interactive page (shown above) that lets the user experiment with a variety of retirement savings scenarios.
What to look for: This dashboard combines two data visualizations, a selector, and a crosstab, all of which interact with each other. The quickest way to see this in action is to enter a retirement year and choose an investment style – Conservative, Moderate, or Aggressive – and watch the all three elements change. If the user decides that a different investment strategy is needed, a financial advisor is just a click away using the Contact Us button. (Note that this example application uses artificial data. Please don’t use it to plan your own retirement!)
Portfolio Performance
What it is: A page that packs a ton of financial performance information into an efficient table.
What to look for: The table (shown above) is a marvel of efficiency and demonstrates iHub’s powerful capabilities. Each line in the table includes five charts in three styles, along with some of the numbers that underlie those charts. You’ll also see scorecard-style red dots indicating a portfolio item that is – appropriately enough – in the red. With this table you can quickly identify which portfolio items are performing well year-over-year, and which items are riskier than others.
One More Thing
If you’re following along in the Example application, you probably noticed that we’ve cropped a toolbar out of the screenshots in this post. (It’s shown above.) You also may have noticed the light blue grid behind the pages. Here’s what those things tell you: You’ve actually been working in the visual dashboard design tool that is built into iHub, Trial Edition. Because that’s so, you can rearrange and resize many of the elements on these dashboards. (Try it!) We also encourage you to create a new tab in the example application and experiment with these tools. You’ll want to keep the iHub Dashboards documentation and tutorials handy as you do.
Next Up
In our next blog post in this series, we will explore another dashboard – the Call Center example application – from the user perspective. Subscribe (at left) and you’ll be notified when that post and others are published.