Leveraging Technology to Market
Thursday, September 6, 2007, 1:00pm - 2:00pm

Adding new consumer-friendly features to online financial services can pay dividends in increased customer loyalty . . . if you can persuade customers to actually use them. This session will present best practices to encourage online customers to adopt new services. A two-step process will be described for strengthening customer relationships. This includes making online tools useful and then incorporating them into existing banking practices. Other topics will include how to induce loyalty over time by introducing such services as account histories.

Tom Groenfeldt is an experienced journalist with broad expertise in financial technology. He has cover capital markets, retail and wholesale banking, and insurance for a wide variety of publications including Banking Technology, STP, the American Banker, Risk and Energy Risk, Institutional Investor, Alpha, and Securities Industry News. He founded Windows in Financial Services, which covers Microsoft technologies in finance, and edited it for 10 years. Before that he was director of marketing, public relations and investor relations for an international banking software company. He is an excellent interviewer and makes for a lively moderator of panels, as he has shown in engagements for SWIFT, The Asian Banker, and Richmond Events. In addition to writing about finance he has written for The Economist, on ship building in Wisconsin; The New York Times on assorted topics in New Jersey and the Financial Times on outsourcing. He has also written about art in Sydney and at Art Basel Miami Beach for artinfo.com.

Abu Noaman is a true American entrepreneur. From practically nothing, he catapulted Elliance to a Business 2.0 “Top 18” Web Development Firm. Abu is a member of the American Marketing Association, and former member of the Business Marketing Association’s Board of Directors. Abu often shares his experience and insights at symposiums and conferences, and recently spoke at America’s Community Bankers Sales and Marketing Conference.

Articles by Abu have been published in the ABA Bank Marketing, Inc. Magazine, Association Trends and other publications.

Stephanie Sturgis-Griffin oversees strategic initiatives for Wholesale Treasury Management related to check processing, conversion and "electronification" the conversion of paper information into digital bytes.
She is responsible for Treasury Management paper and electronic check commercial direct deposit accounts and depository services, and image delivery services. She is also the Wells Fargo Wholesale Banking representative for Check 21, referring to the federal law called the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act.

She has been with Wells Fargo for 20 years. Before joining Treasury Management, she spent 10 years in the Audit Division responsible for auditing the company's payment systems, operations, and support divisions.
Over the last 10 years she has had product management responsibility for a variety of Wells Fargo's Treasury Management products, and spent three years managing Treasury Management conversions.

She received her bachelor's degree from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, with a dual emphasis in economic analysis & policy and accounting. She has her MBA in finance from California State University, Hayward.