Cover Visual:  Watch for opportunities

Page Two Headine:  We know your industry, we understand your needs

Page Two Visual:  Proceed with knowledge

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Expansion and realignment within Financial Services and other industries brings many new opportunities. Secada & Company brings quantified evaluation of all your options -- and specialized insight into building the right solutions for you.

Secada & Company specializes in strategic planning and implementation of Information Technology for financial service providers, and for firms in other IT-intensive industries. Since our company began concentrating in this area more than half a decade ago, we have served an array of clients in New York, London, Zurich, Boston, San Francisco and other financial centers. Our continuing research into the business intelligence needs and practices of more than 100 financial and e-commerce companies helps make Secada & Company one of the financial service industry's leading providers of technology guidance.

The financial industry's needs are accentuated by unique internal and external factors. Within, financial conglomerates are rapidly forming, and new products are emerging that were unimagined just a few years ago. The industry's accelerating growth and consolidation require that technology be implemented quickly and intelligently, with built-in continuity so systems don't have to be rebuilt every year. From outside, the industry is both confronted and potentially advantaged by various forces:

• The Internet -- with its new opportunities in communication and commerce
• Competition from non-financial and e-commerce concerns
• Unprecedented stock market behavior and individual investor participation
• Stockholders' increasingly high, rigid demands for corporate performance.

These market forces raise fundamental questions for business strategies and IT planning:

• What technology should a company build to remain competitive?
• What marketable value-added products will not be cannibalized by e-commerce?
• What choices must be made to leverage expertise globally?

Quantifying technology's added value

Secada & Company creates methodologies to evaluate strategic technology issues for our clients and the software vendors who serve them. The resulting data enables our clients to make more directed, more productive decisions. In turn, more efficient decision-making helps these companies strategize and operate more effectively in the face of aggressive, worldwide competition.

We have long viewed financial services as one industry, envisioning the amalgamation of its brokerage, asset management, insurance and commercial banking components. We have interviewed and assessed the practices of more than 100 leading financial services groups in relation to the whole. Through the use of focus groups, surveys and other techniques, our comprehensive research delineates benchmarks and the best practices for technology use. These guidelines have figured prominently in CIO, Wall Street and Technology and other publications' evaluations of IT and financial industry leaders.

Secada & Company's practical evaluation methods may be employed in system selection, development, testing and throughout production, enabling you to assure your systems will keep delivering maximum competitive strength.

Better risk analysis,
for better rewards

Many corporations spend as much money on technology as a large software firm does, but they do not enjoy the same return on investment. This increases the importance of risk-definition when describing system benefits for these companies.

Using our comprehensive understanding of needs within the specific industry, we help IT groups select paths and technology that align risks with rewards, while keeping the focus on business intelligence strategy.

By quantifying our client's risk/opportunity relationship from the outset, realistic expectations may often be set higher. And by assigning certain IT strategic projects to an IT solutions specialist, a company enables its IT employees to take the larger business-project view (rather than solely IT).

Meanwhile, the specialist resolves problems such as these:

Optimized performance requires optimized performers. Today that frequently means the IT staff is more integral with the organization as a whole. It's also why Secada & Company has developed the insight and understanding to work alongside our clients -- bringing special savvy that enables us to evaluate and implement solutions that will better achieve your company's business goals.

And we are experienced at working with you wherever you are in the world.

Often Secada & Company becomes a continuing partner with firms seeking IT vendors, matching our clients to virtual IT companies that are willing to accept risk and commit to legally binding deliverables while sharing technology ownership. Many other solutions are also very possible.