Z/Yen Goes Clubbing With Charities – Insurers Beware!

No, this is not another of Ian Harris’s madcap ideas for a night out with his favourite clients. Insurance costs for charities have risen substantially over the last 2 years and some organisations in the sector cannot get cover for vital activities. Charity Logistics has commissioned Z/Yen to assess whether charities can help each other through clubbing the risk, e.g. mutual insurance. The feasibility study will involve expert discussion and research into the current charity insurance environment. The research is endorsed by the Active Community Unit of the Home Office, the Charity Finance Directors Group, the Association of Chief Executives in Voluntary Organisations, the Institute of Fundraising and the Charity Commission. The Z/Yen team comprises Stephen Martin, Laura Wright, Michael Mainelli and Ian Harris. Any charities and/or insurance people who wish to participate in this research should contact Stephen Martin or go straight to the on-line survey.

Poor Performance Hits Banks’ Business

Z/Yen has just completed an assignment for six investment banks to interview 30 of their key clients (fund managers) on the operational performance levels expected.Somewhat surprisingly, in these days of much higher focus on back-office operations, two thirds of the fund managers said that they had suspended trading with individual brokers because of poor operational performance.It also seems that IT is not the answer, with only one fund manager placing high importance on availability of banks' systems over the Internet. Z/Yen presented the findings of the survey to the fund management community on 27 March.

Islington Aims To Profit From PropheZy

The Z/Yen Director who named our predictive research project Auguri (see Now and Z/Yen February 2003) had clearly not foreseen the risk of leaving the letter Z out of a Z/Yen name.After a “shock and awesome” boardroom coup, the software suite has now emerged with the name PropheZy.Almost as importantly, Z/Yen has been commissioned by the London Borough of Islington to deploy PropheZy to help Islington make sense of some of its expenditure. Z/Yen will identify the patterns within historical expenditure in order to model the factors that can be used to predict future expenditure. In this way, Islington hopes to be able to predict expenditure earlier in the financial year and allow managers to control expenditure rather than reporting budget overruns and thus avoid the shock and awe that overruns can cause.

Normality Rules OK?!

Z/Yen has concluded a major research project examining liquidity and "normal market size" (NMS) for the London Stock Exchange.The objective of the study was to make recommendations on trade transparency and NMS in order to help with the smooth functioning of the markets.Our team, led by Christopher Hall, supported by Alan Helmore-Simpson and Rakesh Shah, with guidance from Michael Mainelli, Robert Pay, Stephen Wells and Jeremy Smith, worked their way through millions of transactions supplied by the client.Some of the basic analytical processing runs involved over 100 million transactions.The London Stock Exchange is nowexamining some of Z/Yen's thoughts, but heck, who said our team was normal?

BT Phone Home

When it comes to selling IT products, BT thought that they were out in the cold and that no customer even knew that BT supplied IT. However, after Z/Yen generated some customer insight, BT understood that customers knew that they could buy IT from BT but they didn't know whom to call and wanted some account management. Once customers know whom to call, BT should be home (and dry) thanks to Z/Yen.

Another Bunch Of Charities

The Charities Consortium IT Directors Group has chosen Z/Yen to run its 2003 IT benchmarking. A dozen or so of the largest charities in the UK have already signed up for the study.Z/Yen was delighted to be chosen and is especially grateful to some of its favourite clients who recommended us so highly that we won the highly competitive bid.Interestingly, some of those clients who endorsed us so emphatically have not yet subscribed for the study. Anyone interested in subscribing or finding out more about this piece of work should contact Mary O’Callaghan, who is leading the study, with Ian Harris and Giles Wright providing supporting roles.

Extraordinary Expertise

In our never-ending search for new experts for SpecialiZm - Expertise on Demand, we have recently uncovered some very unusual skills.Over the past month we have put forward shortlists for experts in DNA vaccines, international patent law and aramid chemists to name just a few.We can also confirm that not all British armour experts are currently on duty in the Gulf – we have managed to source one for a client within the last few days. If you require or can provide any “extraordinary expertise” give Mark Yeandle a call on the usual number.