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Asset Manager Ixis Using Pyxis' mWholesaler
June 19, 2006
Wireless investment software specialist Pyxis Mobile has sold its mWholesaler system to Ixis Asset Management Advisors Group, giving members of the firm's retail sales team remote access to customer relationship management and other enterprise data via BlackBerry devices.
Ixis Asset Management Advisors becomes the 22nd out of the 50 largest U.S. investment firms to install software from Waltham, Mass.-based Pyxis, which provides a series of wireless buy-side applications including mWholesaler, mInstitutional, mPortfolio and mAnalyst. Several customers are in the mutual fund capital of Boston, including Eaton Vance Distributors, John Hancock Financial Services, Pioneer Investments, Putnam Investments and now Ixis.
"We typically go in with mWholesaler" and other products may follow, Pyxis Mobile CEO Shane Hughes said in an interview last week, ahead of the official announcement of the Ixis deal at the Securities Industry Association's Technology Management Conference.
Ixis is part of the Ixis Asset Management Group, a top-20 global money manager based in France, with a total of $546 billion under management. Hughes said that mWholesaler is only in the U.S. unit, but there may be an opportunity to do more. Pyxis, which has 50 employees, recently opened a sales office in London. Enterprise data applications like those of Pyxis are rare in Europe, and "it's more a matter of educating that market about communicating with the back end," Hughes said.
Ixis said it has already improved salesperson productivity by converting to
mWholesaler along with the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution from Canada's Research in Motion. "We looked for a mobile application that was easy to learn, easy to use, and wouldn't be information overload," said George Patsouris, VP of business systems at Ixis. MWholesaler is "making it easy to get all the critical information on top producers throughout their territory. Their time is focused and the wholesaler is more efficient."
Research in Motion VP of corporate marketing Mark Guibert said mWholesaler's success in the financial industry is "a great example of how enterprise customers are embracing BlackBerry for a growing range of mobile applications beyond wireless e-mail and achieving greater productivity, customer service and competitive advantage in the field."
Hughes attributed Pyxis' "good momentum" to "the prevalence of handheld devices, particularly the BlackBerry, in financial services, [an industry that is] talking a lot about data and e-mail in the devices. Many of our customers look for ROI [return on investment], so they roll out Pyxis with back-end data access first and add e-mail after that." He added that hedge funds are "a new market opportunity" that has panned out quickly since the January release of mHedge Manager. Though unable to disclose customer names, he said, "Sales cycles with large asset managers are typically six to nine months, but for hedge funds it's less than 60 days, because it doesn't have to go through a lot of committees."
