IRIS Financial Solutions is a networking company for banks, medical, dental, and small businesses. IRIS financial solutions is offering various services such as in data and voice wiring, operating systems and applications, Internet access, Web site, Intranet for customers and suppliers and phone system to meet all the evolving needs of their customers. The company integrates all the components to serve their client by maintaining and supporting their total communication and information systems. The goal of the company is to allow all the small businesses to focus on core businesses by handling information technology logistics that will help the all the financial institutions and businesses. IRIS financial solutions company manages the total process of installations, maintenance, integration, and support of information technology. Iris financial solutions handle all the IT issues of the companies through their Microsoft certified network engineers and technicians that support the company to run efficiently and be connected. IRIS financial solutions assess the environment and maintain the alignment of their clients to their organizational goals and directives through information technology solutions. The company manages the scope of project by minimizing the risk of cost overruns. IRIS Financial Solutions Company configures the hardware and software of banking institutions in order to provide optimum performance.
The company has alliance with HP and Dell in order to provide excellent site service contracts to fit on the needs of their clients. The company administers Microsoft’s server technologies like Windows 2000 Active directory, SQL, and Exchange. IRIS Solutions Company is offering various services such as by coordinating with outside vendors to ensure their clients’ IT decisions with vision of their practice. The company is formulating technology solutions in supporting practice management and in providing annual service support plans.
External Environment
Businesses and financial institutions have increasing demands to work faster and deliver their services in shorter and tighter cycles. Information technology is in upward trend for decades and most businesses are now facing challenges in dealing with tremendous changes. Most businesses and financial institutions are focusing on their core strengths in addressing the needs of their clients and customers. Financial institutions are now investing on information technology to deliver better decision making capabilities and to have interactions with customers and suppliers in a real time basis on-line. Financial institutions are now developing systems to make unique parts of their efficiency and to operate uninterruptedly in a secure environment. Most of the demands cannot just be satisfied by standard off-the-shelf solutions and businesses need to have partners with skills in working with customers. Businesses are now looking ways to leverage their existing investments by modernizing their tools effectively. Currently, IT becomes a commodity to business end and there is a widespread acceptance of doing business through Internet as a matter of convenience. Information technology adapts changes constantly and product obsolescence threatens the viability of any business plan. There are the challenges expressed in most companies and financial institutions such as lacking of internal staff with expertise in the area of technology. Companies demand for rapid application deployment as they need scalability and economic conditions mandate. Financial institutions are concerned with predictability, cost containment, and resource reduction (Evnine, 2008).
Target Market
IRIS financial solutions aim to respond quickly and deliver solutions to businesses and financial institutions. The company introduces their newer ways in performing things into all parts of their organization and improving the business outcomes. IRIS financial solutions approach the companies in their covering process, delivery, and technology innovations. They are working collaboratively to companies in gathering all the business opportunities by providing intensive technology solutions. The company works efficiently with small to large organizations to accelerate implementations and distribution of its solutions. Their functions provide the state of the art solutions in the area of operational risk, credit calibration, and rating. They become partners of companies with core banking solution and suppliers of equipment and software to their clients. They are also offering wide variety of training courses to companies such as in Funds Transfer pricing. IRIS provides services to financial institutions that act as intermediaries in capital and debt markets. These are the companies that are transferring funds and facilitate the flow of resources through the economy. They provide front and middle office solutions to leading trading and investment firms by giving them new level of excellence in terms of customer service. IRIS financial solutions bring world class experience to world’s top financial service technology firms in the industry in terms of their customer service and revenue producing unit. The company also supports largest financial institutions and service firms through their fixed income accounting system for tier 1 and super regional banks. They manage the largest global accounts through their application development, testing, configuration, and account management (Evnine, 2008).
Price
IRIS financial solutions set principles that define their clients’ expectations. They deliver new services and products that will open new opportunities for their partners. Allowing them to work and develop long term strategies in minimizing their clients’ cost and maximizing their ROI and value. IRIS financial solutions provide clear and fair pricing that allows their customers to acquire their products on flexible basis based on their specific business needs and requirements. The company serves as the leading supplier in innovating business solutions from small to medium sized accounting operations. They enable businesses and financial institutions on line with powerful e-commerce, e-business, and web enabled technology. They have data partitioning wherein all their transactions and requests are routed across number of systems and can be broken up into sub systems and run on different systems. Their applications are highly configurable business components that let their customers to set up for their new business flow quickly. The company has patterns to make integration easy and non invasive with ancillary systems and databases. They become partners of companies with core banking solution and suppliers of equipment and software to their clients. The company integrates all the components to serve their client by maintaining and supporting their total communication and information systems. The goal of the company is to allow all the small businesses to focus on core businesses by handling information technology logistics that will help the all the financial institutions and businesses.
Place
The recent development of Iris Financial Systems is the core of technology in financial aspect and the objects of business in the technology of Java for building the applications and running with the platform of J2EE coming from Sun Microsystems. The systems of tailored trading was then developed at the minimum being tried and components as tested with re-used for developing the applications considerably new. The distribution is global and also interoperates the trading infrastructure considered as existent with management implementation in terms of application of information. This application is bringing together the trade, risk data including the portfolio coming from the disparate systems in producing such aggregated reports in the real time of Profit and Loss (Carratt, 2007). The development of such applications was then developed with the use of Financial Systems that provides the efficiency of operations and can be integrated very easily with the applications of third party in driving the needed output.
The traditional aspect with regards to the clients of Iris Financial System began from the bulge-bracket, tie from one of the investment banks in global area that requires the systems as tailored for full time operations daily. The asset range as well as the components of application can be defined as specific in terms of increases, the tier remainder with the organizations that may be of good benefits. The global access is indeed available with the range of interface’s user which was then developed with performance of disruptive areas. The applications including implantation is commonly used with the Java’s tailoring wherein this applications known to be developed and with rapid development in J2EE that may be supported in global distribution. The frameworks for business is in-house that enables the focus of specific requirements.
Marketing Mix Analysis
Products
Direct marketing is important in Iris Financial Solutions and this is being regarded as the integral part of the marketing practice as overall due to its evolvement with the human beginning that includes mail order catalogues and stamps of gold bond. Direct marketing is of nowadays usage with the hyper channels of communication and the internet, satellite technologies including the mobile are of no longer tools for communication with the power machines used in marketing the sophistication.
Promotion
The use of power machines are allowed for marketing with the change of human interaction to power machines in order to enter the sophisticated marketing. Direct marketing is the core of promotion because this is considered as the direct practice of marketing that covers the overall beginnings with catalogues and stamps in gold bond paper. Promotion is also done through the technological advancements.
Product Distribution
The main target is the customers and deal with the budgets of marketing including the cost items with investment return. Most customers should be delighted including higher executives. The implementation of direct marketing is important in art and science wherein the art is true and creative because this can be of great help with regards to the product distribution.
Pricing
The database from customer is considered as the powerful resource of profit that includes the challenge to obtain the data of meaningful customer as well as the constraints in the usual system (Carratt, 2007). There should be a great need when it comes to identification and analysis due to pricing. Pricing should be very reasonable and acceptable to most people for the company to stay in the field of business.
Relationship Marketing
Iris Financial Solutions used direct marketing to their clients with the use of art and science. Art because the company is creative and science that serves as catching up that content with the quantity and quality of data issuance. The industry is of great challenge due to the needs of real people and subjected to customers who are more demanding due to reward and the right products that should be given at the right time. Most marketers may even face the dilemma with such huge opportunity in order to reach out the customers but also respects the privacy of customers. The other point of pressure is showing the results and deal with the budgets of marketing as the cost items in respect to the privacy of most customers. The other point of pressure is to deal with the budgets of marketing known as the items of cost and to have the investment return. The information may be gathered in loyalty program due to collection of data with the means of empirical and practical aspects. The people are given reward points to accumulate and the delayed redemption is also not good enough. Most customers wanted such gratification and at the same time flexibility. Most customers also appreciate in control and create the card of tailor-made wherein most banks may test the value in many forms of various propositions, gain the insights as valuable that pertains to the customer segments.
Aside from direct marketing, campaign is also considered as the relationship in marketing. There is a new plan with the policyholders in category that includes such high propensity in buying the new plan with enjoyment of good returns that came from the purchasing. There were also two sets of direct mailers for reflecting the name as well as the contact number of servicing the life planner.
Customer Profile
It is apparent that in terms of market potential, of which IRIS has garnered but a fragment, there exists a lot of opportunity. The industry as of now and likely to grow in future, as people are getting increasingly health conscious. The industry caters to 16 million customer, who are but a fragment of total population even after excluding very young and very old at the two ends of the population spectrum.
The IRIS has done well to focus on one segment – full service Financial services – with the goal to consolidate it. However, somewhere in the way it appears the focus was lost and there are still serious challenges that must be addressed if the IRIS needs to develop into a standardized, systemized, management approach. The challenges before IRIS as identified by us include more or less every segment from Marketing, and Sales to Organizational command structure, and Budgeting.
Although IRIS is relatively better managed than similar service providers, a lot still needs to be done to put the organization into shape. However, there are some unique advantages to IRIS that needs to be capitalized. This industry has a low concentration ratio, and none of its rivals have a significant market share. IRIS has the advantage of experience as well as the advantage of its goal to apply modern management. Therefore, instead of cutting costs, the company must think in terms of broadening its revenue model. In order to pursue an advantage over its rivals, the company may choose one or more of the following:
- Changing price means a temporary advantage is likely to be had in raising or lowering prices.
- Offering Product differentiation in the case of IRIS means rolling out more features with improved and innovative components added to them so that the members have greater option to purchase one or more services offered.
IRIS can produce output results that lead to value creation from a diverse range of service. Since, it is an expanding enterprise it is in a position to produce new results of increasing value. It is presumed that additional capital will be needed in order to produce new results. The capital can be acquired or developed as specific performance solutions, and then utilized to produce improved or new results of increased value. The value added to new business results must justify the capital expenditure to acquire or develop needed solutions and provide the return on investment.
Basing our analysis on Porter’s five forces, we recommend that:
- Rivalry can be made difficult for competitors by value addition (incorporate programs based on latest scientific researches in health and fitness industry).
- Fitness equipments used by the company must be its own patent (the company can think of its own R&D through collaborative tie-ups).
- Strengthen its own brand image
- Make switching cost difficult for customers through a combination of price, service, and loyalty benefit programs.
- Enable ex-members to reconsider joining on easier terms.
Conclusion
Iris Financial Solutions is a good company with main focus to customers and marketing. This company is good in consideration with the different aspects that includes the views as well as the target market and clients. Iris Financial Solutions is also aware with the increased awareness of plans and the efficiency of cost in relation to sales. The company exists in order to gain more profit and be able to be competitive in all aspects of business. The use of different marketing strategies is of great help because of the contribution in profit and the style in the field of business. Though there are lots of pressures experienced by Iris Financial Solutions, the company remains to stand in their own. Research and studies are also applied in this field of business in order to test the different styles of marketing with strategic point of view that may be implemented. The company is also using incentives due to component of loyalty programs wherein there is also an exchange of value between the retailer and the customers. Loyalty marketing can be seen with the maximization of profit but not the cost center. There is also an ability in order to make money which can be further used in investing activity. Given the fact that there are many competitors, Iris Financial Solutions remained to stand and continually searching for discoveries with many important views that can be used in the future.
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