Indianapolis, IN- Passageways, the leading provider of portal solutions to the financial industry organized another edition of its annual 3-day conference on
Collaboration across the industry and within the Enterprise. This was the 5
th year for this growing conference which attracted over 150 attendees from across United States and Canada. The event was held in downtown Indianapolis, in the Roof Ball Room.
The highlights of the conference included a riveting keynote address by Mark Meyer, CEO Filene Research Institute. This was an enlightening address highlighting some of the challenges and opportunities facing the Financial Services industry.
There was a presentation by the two co-founders of Passageways Paroon Chadha and Christopher Beltran on "Passageways : Today and Tomorrow", setting the tone for the rest of the conference. This session highlighted the 7 industry awards Passageways solutions won in the past year including multiple CU Journal Best Practices awards, Bank Technology news Best Practices award, BankNews Innovative solutions award, Inc. 5000 and Indiana Companies to watch listing to name a few. This session also featured the release of a Verona, a community portal solution which is already fostering industry-wide collaboration networks across the financial services industry. In addition, Passageways also highlighted several enhancements to its flagship Employee Portal and Board Portal solutions.
This year's event also featured a panel discussion on "Current and anticipated trends in Collaboration and their impact on Business", moderated by Paroon Chadha. The panel attracted leaders from across the industry and made for an insightful discussion, enough to spark several tweets from the live audience, which were being projected, live to the audience in the auditorium and online on twitter.com.
The panel consisted of:
- Randy Karnes, CEO of CU*Answers
- Doug True, CTO and CLO, Forum Credit Union, Founder of the Filene i3 group
- Curtis Falk- Open Solutions Community portal Leader
- Kevin Roddy, CIO of 3rd Federal bank, Partner Chair of Open Solutions Client Association
- Mike Atkins, CEO of Open Technology Solutions
- Christopher Beltran, Co-Founder Passageways and Collaboration Visionary
The event also featured several presentations by various banks and credit unions competing for the annual best practices competition, which was judged, live by the audience. The awards for the 2010 edition of PowWOW were won by:
- Best New Portal Implementation : United Communities Credit Union, Canada
- Best New Module : Sandia Laboratory Federal Credit Union, NM, (Employee Handbook)
- Best Use of Portal for Streamlining Processes : Mutual 1st Federal Credit Union, Omaha, NE, (Compliance Connections)
- America's Best Portal Page Design : American Airlines Credit Union
America's Best Portal Page competition was organized online, and received a total of 44 entries. After two weeks of collecting these entries, online voting was open to the general public from May 5 through May 12, 2010. The competition received an overwhelming response. Over 3900 people viewed the entries, and nearly 1600 votes were cast in 8 days, culminating on May 12, the awards night.
The conference also included several new product introductions including a Verona (Community Portal Platform), Sales Management Module, the next version of the Portal framework P4, version 4.6 and a sneak peek at the iPhone application for the Passageways portals.
Verona, the most significant product introduction is industry's first platform built for collaboration for groups of credit unions and community banks all working in private and secure membership based (Facebook-like) community portals. Passageways is already powering a community of 450 banks and credit unions for Open Solutions Inc. and is currently planning a community for its own 200 clients and another community for CU*Answers , a Michigan based core processing CUSO serving more than 200 credit unions.
Passageways team also proudly presented checks of over $6,000 to two charitable organizations American Red Cross and Northwest Haiti Christian Mission. These contributions were raised by Passageways staff through online auctions for staff and customers running on Passageways portals across the country.
"This was a great confluence of industry's foremost thinkers around collaboration. Apart from rolling out new products, Passageways is proud to be the platform for transforming industry and enterprise knowledge into future success", say Paroon Chadha, Co-Founder Passageways.
"New products, new ideas, and a recharged team - it just does not get any better for our team. PowWOW 2010 was easily the most exciting event we have witnessed. Financial Industry is clearly focused on finding new efficiencies to drive down cost of business and finding new revenue sources and Passageways is focused on innovating at the speed of market demands", says Christopher Beltran, Co-Founder Passageways.
The evening also included a casino night and rock band which allowed all the participants to get meet each other and celebrate another exciting year for all Passageways clients and partners.
About Passageways
Passageways is an Indiana based provider of employee, board and community portal solutions for Credit Unions and community banks. Passageways helps over 200 organizations to collaborate and communicate more effectively using its software platforms. For more information please visit www.passageways.com