Category: Intuit

Software for Independent Financial Planners

In a  recent blog entry Tom Peters addressed the  question, "Can a small financial services firm compete in a world of Citigroups and Bank of Americas?" Peters put together a list of 16 ‘Must Dos’, Two of the ‘Must Dos’  especially caught my eye:

  • " Sophisticated use of information technology.* (Small-"ish" is no excuse for "small aims"/execution in IS/IT!" 
  • "Web-power!* (The Web can make very small very big … if the product-service is super-cool and one purposefully masters buzz/viral marketing.)"

They caught my attention because the software for independent financial planners that we are piloting right now will help small financial planners compete with the big guys. If you are an independent financial planner who manages your customer’s assets and you are interested in helping us pilot test our software drop me an email marion_vermazen at intuit.com.

As I was writing this blog entry I discovered that  Tom Peters recently posted a blog entry about what he has learned in his first year of blogging. It resonated with me and it gave me a new perspective on a couple of things like the power of small posts and how blogging breaks can lead to better blogging. I really enjoy reading The Tom Peters blog. It is a group blog and the posts are almost always interesting and thought provoking.

Financial Planner Research Project

Intuit is looking for financial planners who would be interested in participating in a research project over the summer, late July through October. We would like you to try out a new product and tell us what you think about it. The product focuses on helping you manage your clients’ portfolios. If this sounds interesting to you please send me an email at marion_vermazen at intuit dot com. Give me your phone number and I will give you a call back to give you more information.

Scalability

When I looked for a definition of the word scalable I discovered it is a buzz word that hasn’t made it into the mainstream dictionaries. The webopedia definition says that scalable refers to how well a hardware or software system reacts to increased demands.

I was in a meeting the other day where scalability came up. I’m sure you’ve had those kinds of conversations. One person told their  scalability story and then the next person had a better one and so on. I mentioned the Vatican web site’s need to be scalable when the Pope died (Sun systems helped with that). Someone else mentioned Visa’s need to be scalable at Christmas time but  my favorite was the Intuit person who told us the very large number of income tax returns that Intuit’s TurboTax for the Web filed in the 36 hours before the filing deadline. The number of returns filed per minute was staggering. And as she said just imagine the consequences if the system had not been able to handle the load. I doubt that the IRS would have been very forgiving for late filings if the reason had been Intuit’s system failed. Luckily Intuit’s system is highly scalable and very reliable.

So I’d love to hear some other scalability stories. I bet there are some good ones out there.

Intuit Blogs

I’m sure you are all dying to know if I made it to work on time today 🙂  Yep, I did. Instead of the hour and 15 minutes it took yesterday it only took 40 minutes  today so I was early which I much prefer.

It was quite a productive day and I discovered two more Intuit blogs. I already regularly read the Official Quickbooks Online Weblog.   The Rental Property Manager group has also just started a an official blog.  Both of these are group blogs. On the Rental Property Manager Blog they are trying out the idea of pointing users to the product forum to make comments. It will be interesting to see how it works. Group blogs like these and the Tom Peters Weblog have a different flavor than individual blogs but I still enjoy reading them. I think they are strongest when the personalities of the individuals and of the team come through.

I’m also going to enjoy reading the blog one of my co-workers has started.  Christine Rimer’s  blog chronicles the  progress in creating a Quicken team blog. These are exciting times. It will be very interesting to see what kind of an impact blogging has.