Trust Exchange 2017 Release is LIVE!

Release Features

This major release launches our new user interface, which features beautifully redesigned views, intuitive navigation and forms, greater user control over permissions and significantly enhanced reporting flexibility.  In addition to these platform upgrades, system updates have been implemented that increase speed and stability, several bug fixes have been applied, and support resources have been expanded.

Platform-wide User Experience Redesign

The new Trust Exchange user interface features attractive, easy to understand views and intuitive top level navigation in the left sidebar, as well links to user-friendly support resources and company information in the footer of every page.  In addition, helpful text descriptions and mouse over information is served up contextually throughout, and forms for searches, reports and information entry have been extensively redesigned for simple and efficient input of parameters and data.

Enhanced Dashboard Information

Dashboard pie charts have been replaced with dynamic graphs which provide detailed information on multiple aspects of portfolio list status at a glance.  The new dashboard also features a scrolling feed in the right sidebar highlighting summaries of new events created in portfolio companies.  The dashboard continues to offer direct navigation between portfolios, and list management, monitoring and reporting tools remain accessible via the list drop down menu.  New, expanded reporting capabilities can be utilized by clicking on the “Reports” icon in the navigation sidebar.

Intuitive, Versatile Reporting Tools

In the updated interface, reports are built using easy-to-understand report wizards and permit significantly increased reporting versatility.  Event Reports and Checklist Reports can be created for any number or combination of companies and/or portfolios. Each report type allows the user to select a custom set of events or checklists to report on, and the user may choose from several convenient, pre-set date ranges.

Flexible Company Profiles

Both company profile views and reports increase user control over the types of events displayed and the date range covered.  Enterprise tier users may now delete events which they themselves have created from a company’s timeline.
 

Expanded Company Information

Company information input forms are now tiered in multiple tabs, allowing a user to add basic information and then more details as desired.  A company owner has access to additional tabs to further complete their company’s profile.  This information works hand-in-hand with enhanced search capabilities and will allow prospective customers searching Trust Exchange to more easily find vendors who meet their needs.  Trust Exchange and its partners will also use this information to feature companies who meet the criteria of our enterprise customers who are seeking vendors with specific attributes.

Improved Document Management

Documents can now be uploaded in a user’s “Files” section via an easy-to-use form.  When attaching a document to an event, a user’s list of documents is served up at the bottom of the new event entry form, allowing a user to click to select any number of documents to attach them to the event.

Enhancements

Several useful enhancements have been implemented with this release:

• Editing permissions can now be selectively granted for both private and public events

• A “Comments” field, which displays in the Event Report as well as in event summaries, has been added to all event types

• Users can now navigate to portfolios from a company profile

• Functional organization is improved for portfolio and user settings

• Many entry fields for event creation, checklist monitoring, permissions and reports throughout the platform now use incremental search rather than scrolling lists for input selection

Disrupting B2B Information: Free the Data

As discussed in our earlier post about B2B Credit Middlemen, a powerful aspect of doing business on the Internet is the elimination of sales and distribution layers between the producer and consumer. In a typical non-Internet value chain there are many “value-added” steps in the process between the producer and consumer. Each step increases costs and reduces profit. 

Internet distribution models eliminate many of these steps by scaling distribution and eliminating sales complexity (e.g. Amazon, iTunes and Zappos). In this post, we will attempt to illustrate the value chain for the B2B credit industry and point out the false value provided by the credit industry middlemen: the credit bureaus.

Credit Bureaus

Credit bureaus estimate a company’s viability by aggregating data from other businesses for them to use in making new credit application decisions. Unlike banks and financial institutions, they DON’T ISSUE CREDIT. Businesses issue credit to each other and should be the real arbiters of worthiness.

Furthermore, this data is created by businesses, provided to the credit bureaus (for a fee of course), and then resold to other businesses. The never-ending fees keep people from using the service and in turn make the data less accurate, less timely and pretty useless. Who is a better judge of a company’s viability: a random call center operator or the people at companies who interact with each other?

Free the Data

The prevalent business model among these bureaus is to charge companies to ”establish” their profile, charge to view other companies’ profiles and charge to submit data regarding the quality of interactions they have with other companies. Charging to submit data is a disincentive to accuracy and keeps the largest population of companies (small businesses) from participating. If companies could freely exchange THEIR data, then there would be a more timely and probably more accurate way to determine creditworthiness.

The value of the data increases as the number of active users in the network increases. A sort of Metcalfe’s Law for social networks in practice. The data should be free!

At Trust Exchange we've creating a community of businesses who disclose information with each other to build trust.  We believe that with increase trust, business happens faster and more effectively. We've helped many companies in several industries.  If you're interested in learning more you can either request a DEMO.  

OR...just get started with a Free account HERE.  

The Credit Union and CUSO Compliance Knot

Credit Unions and CUSO's are facing a tough compliance landscape.  After the passing of Dodd-Frank, vendor management,  as applied to financial institutions became much more complex.  Each regulatory body (OCC, FDIC, NCUA, OCC and the Federal Reserve) has issued their own rules and guidelines for achieving and maintaining compliance with the new regulations. The monitoring aspect of these guidelines require financial institutions and their vendors to communicate and exchange critical information more frequently and on a much deeper level.  CUSO's (Credit Union Service Organizations for the uninitiated) and some financial "super vendors," have a particularly challenging problem with compliance due to the multiple layers of one-to-many relationships. 

The monitoring requirement for Credit Union and CUSO compliance, increases the number of minimum interactions between a vendor and credit union exponentially.  The frequency and depth of these interactions depend upon the risk posed by each service provided.  High risk vendors (payments, clearing, settlement) must be monitored at a higher frequency than low risk vendors (non-core, staffing, facilities etc.).  For example, a high risk vendor might require the review of monthly SLA's, quarterly performance and qualifications, whereas a low risk vendor might only require the review of insurance and qualifications annually. 

Adding to this compliance complexity for CUSOs is the fact that many of them provide more than one service and may utilize downstream vendors as well.  Each of these services has an independent risk profile and associated monitoring frequency.  Just delivering these compliance documents to their Credit Union clients can quickly become an unmanageable problem:  a seemingly infinite number of interactions.  This is an exponential problem and unfortunately, the existing tools (email, spreadsheets, people) are linear solutions and won't solve it without increasing costs.

Fortunately, the latest influx of solutions from the Internet has provided us with several models that give us hints on how to untie this knot.  For instance, the sharing or collaborative economy model illustrates a clear path to getting to scale without breaking the bank by opening up the data and enabling each participant to create valuable data. 

At TrustExchange, we've studied this problem from several industry points of view:  finance, logistics, shipping and healthcare and have built a product that leverages a few of these key innovations to solve the compliance problem.  Credit Unions and CUSO's have a unique  compliance challenge because of their position as a "super vendor" and sitting in the middle of a large compliance interchange.  By creating a solution that leverages lessons from the collaborative economy, we've built a scalable collaborative compliance platform that solves this problem for CUSO's and Credit Unions simultaneously.

Contact us to learn more about how we can solve this problem for you! 

CONTACT US!!