Pershing unveils second-generation NetX360 mobile platform

Ram Nagappan, Pershing LLC’s chief information officer, is something of a visionary.

Not only does he love technology for technology’s sake — he gets positively giddy showing off new things — he loves applying it to improve business processes.

And that is exactly what Mr. Nagappan had on display last week at Pershing’s annual Insite conference held in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Standing at the “flexible-technology kiosks,” financial advisers were able to test-drive demonstration versions of the second generation of Pershing’s NetX360 mobile platform, which I first wrote about in April.

These weren’t tied to a fully functioning back-end data warehouse but nonetheless showcased the attractive, highly intuitive front-end interface design to which advisers should gain access in the coming months.

The interface was running on a variety of tablet devices, including Apple’s iPad, but perhaps more impressively, on several different devices running Microsoft’s latest mobile operating systems. Included among them was the Surface Pro Windows 8 tablet model from Samsung.

“I had an iPad that I used at work but have since bought a Surface and am pretty excited at the prospect of this becoming available,” said John Walsh, a regional branch manager with Capitol Securities Management Inc. “It would really be great to have access not only to the NetX360 platform but also all my Microsoft Office applications right there on one very portable and powerful device.”

MULTITASKING

Mr. Nagappan pointed out another advantage of the Microsoft devices that is often lost on advisers who have become enamored of their iPads. Microsoft’s Surface Pro and RT devices can run multiple tasks at once that can be left running in their own tabs. This is something that iPads, for all their good looks and responsiveness, are incapable of at present.

Both literally and figuratively speaking, what had Mr. Nagappan most excited were things around the corner from the kiosks. That is where he had set up Pershing’s Advanced Technology Labs.

Standing in front of two big-screen displays and decked out in a portable headset was Joseph Pasion, a vice president in Pershing’s retail-services unit.

At Mr. Nagappan’s behest, he launched into the first of two demonstrations of working futuristic technology that many advisers I know would go gaga over, specifically, voice biometrics and natural-language processing.

Mr. Nagappan said he likes to refer to it informally and colloquially as OK NetX360, alluding to Google’s new feature in which users can initiate searches by saying, “OK, Google.” The search engine giant showed off the platform at its own annual convention for developers, Google I/O.

The initial demonstration was of a scenario that is probably quite common for advisers on the go: accessing their account management system on their smartphones.

In this case, the implementation was hands-free and voice-enabled. So to illustrate, let’s say an adviser just took a typical hands-free voice call from his client, inquiring about something related to his or her accounts.

Today an adviser would have to hang up and check on it.

If driving, the adviser would pull off the road and then turn his visual attention to the device, launching an app, typing in a password, perhaps having to use a second form of authentication.

In our futuristic demonstration, Mr. Pasion, playing the part of the adviser, simply spoke into his headset, “Open NetX360.” With his smartphone screen projected onto the big-screen display, the app window opened and a voice asked him what he wanted.

One thing you might have missed initially (I did) was the secure granting of access to the platform.

“We used voice biometrics,” Mr. Nagappan said.

The system recognized certain key characteristics of Mr. Pasion’s voice, unique features that it would be difficult to duplicate without recording him surreptitiously. That, in turn, allowed immediate access to the system without additional manual input.

Next came the query addressing the client’s question, which in this case related to shares of Apple Inc. stock held.

COMPLEX QUERIES

Mr. Pasion went a step further, asking how many clients had more than a certain threshold of Apple stock in their portfolios.

“Twelve clients are holding more than 200 shares of Apple,” came the system’s verbal response.

And remember in our typical day-to-day adviser scenario, this would all be hands-free.

“Siri cannot do this yet,” Mr. Nagappan said. “She simply does not understand the financial services context specific to such a query.”

Mr. Nagappan went on to explain that Pershing is working with a third-party firm that specializes in this particular type of development work.

He declined to disclose the name of that company.

In a nutshell, the work ahead is continuing to teach Pershing’s system the financial language necessary to interact readily with most of the typical repertoire found in an adviser’s day-to-day lexicon.

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