On The Horizon | August 2020

I’ll keep this short and sweet. Our roadmap for the second half of the year remains focused on the improvement and modernization of our products and services. A big part of this is lessening our dependency of Message Central, OPIUM, and other older systems and instead invest more of our time and effort in faster platforms like Blueshift and WT Marketing Cloud to drive value.

That’s our broader focus. And below, the team reports the nitty gritty on all the latest.

IN THIS EDITION

• Meet Tracky
• Lytics Huddles
• PUMA Team Updates
• Data: Drive with Confidence | New Course!
• Phish Alerts

– Daryl

INTRODUCING TRACKY | OUR DYNAMIC TRACK RECORD BOT

We’d like to formally introduce you to Tracky, our Track Record bot created by the GPS team. This powerful bot can manage the entire track record process by seamlessly doing the following:

1. Track & execute published trade recommendations (subscriber alerts).
2. Enter trades into the portfolio database & legal tracker spreadsheets.
3. Send trade confirmation emails to financial gurus & editorial teams.

If you’d like to see Tracky in action, you can check out a demo of the bot entering a trade into Portfolio Tracker here. Currently, we run track record support for Money Map Press, but plan to roll this out to other clients in the near future.

–        Tori Longo, Global Portfolio Services Product Owner

HOW TO REALLY PERSONALIZE YOUR CUSTOMER’S JOURNEY

The Customer Intelligence hosted two Lytics Huddles last month to cover everything you need to get started and using Journey Canvas (formerly Orchestrate). This journey-building feature allows you to deliver personalized marketing across channels without overlapping your targeting.

PART ONE | Craig Schinn from Actable, and Oxford Club’s TJ Tate present on how Oxford Club uses the Journey Canvas feature. This is a good example if you want to see Lytics in action and how to get the full scope of how to use Journey Canvas to your full advantage. Watch the recording here.

PART TWO | In this second journey-building installment, Craig dives deep into Journeys and their capability with Kim Toomey from Lytics. You will get an excellent walkthrough into the system and best practices when using the tool. Watch the recording here.

If you have any questions about Journey Canvas or getting started with Lytics, please reach out to the Customer Intelligence team here.

PUMA TEAM | WT MARKETING CLOUD UPDATES

LEAD-GEN | Beta testing has begun with NewMarket Group, Oxford Club, and Banyan Hill, as well as a demo of the product to Money Map. If you are interested in testing or going through a demo, please reach out to Matt Williams. You can read more about the MVP and Q3 priorities for Lead-Gen here.

E-COMM | We’ve put together the E-Comm MVP requirements after a great roundtable with Domestic businesses and are in the process of scheduling one with International affiliates. We’re planning to beta test with affiliates by September for features in the E-Comm MVP (except payment processing). We will develop and integrate payment processing as beta testing progresses, to give users time to get acclimated with WMC for creating order pages.

DATA: DRIVE WITH CONFIDENCE | NEW COURSE NOW AVAILABLE!

Our latest Data Literacy Awareness course will help you understand the importance of data literacy when it comes to your role within The Agora Companies. This interactive and exploratory course provides awareness of how data literacy impacts your role and sets expectations for a data literate workforce. We encourage everyone and anyone to enroll in the course in Evolve. Enroll directly from the Announcements page in Evolve.

For any questions is help accessing Evolve, please reach out to the L&D team here.

SKETCHY EMAIL? THERE’S AN APP (AND TEAM) FOR THAT

For as long as anyone can remember, emails have appeared in our mailboxes that we’ve either marked as spam into Junk E-Mail folders or deleted outright. They can range from annoying to potentially dangerous for users and the company as a whole. Our email security filtering system, Mimecast, keeps these emails out. However, the senders of these dangerous emails will always be looking for ways to circumvent mail filters.

No matter how good our defenses are, some will always slip through. That’s why we need to be prepared for when these cases arise by knowing what to look for and what we should be doing. We have a team who manages Information Security, but it’s everyone’s responsibility to understand how to report these emails and why.

SPAM VS. PHISHING

The first thing to recognize when receiving a message from an unknown external sender is whether the message is a “marketing” email (otherwise known as spam) or a phishing email with intentions of stealing information or compromising systems.  Spam emails are not dangerous, just unwanted, and typically feature unsubscribe links to remove yourself from their lists. In the cases where an unsubscribe link is not present, or if they are requiring an email response to opt out of the lists, the best scenario is to block the sender through your preferred platform (Outlook, OWA, etc.) which will automatically send the messages to a junk email folder or deleted items.

PHISH ALERT PROCESS

Even with spam emails, there are cases where you see an email that appears suspicious and you don’t want to click anything in it (including unsubscribe links).  For cases like this, we have had a system in place to report these emails to the InfoSec team. That system is known as the Phish Alert, which is located at the top of your received email messages. Here’s what happens once you click the Phish Alert button:

1. The Phish Alert button sends an email tosecurity@14west.us and our PhishER compilation system, with the suspicious message as an attachment for review.
2. The InfoSec team will then analyze the message and determine if it is safe to click or interact with.
3. After analysis has completed, you will receive a direct response letting you know the results. If the responses appear automated, they both are and aren’t.We have crafted almost 50 different responses depending on the types of emails that come through.  The PhishER system allows us to send these emails directly to the users, completely personalized, and addressing the reported message.  It also gives us high levels of insight and reporting into the attacks we are receiving on a daily basis.  While we can’t predict the attacks we are going to be hit with, PhishER allows us to be as proactive as possible and quickly quarantine malicious messages from mailboxes so our users don’t even have to read them.

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT (OR JUST MORE PROACTIVE)

When you receive an email that you are suspicious of, the initial action should be to immediately report the message using the Phish Alert.  This will notify the correct engineers on the InfoSec team quickly and ensure the issue is resolved.

Also, as you may have noticed at times during the year, we use the Phish Alert system to run simulated attacks. The best way to defend against attacks is to prepare our users with similar attacks and see how they respond. We are able to get full reports on clicks, responses, and many other categories so we can determine if further training is needed.  While the simulations can be scary because everyone is receiving suspicious looking messages, they are nowhere near as scary as actual attacks that can hit all of our users within seconds.

UPCOMING TRAININGS AND WEBINARS

Our goal moving forward is to have everyone become more aware and mindful of the emails they are receiving. When something appears out of place or is obviously an attack, we will know exactly how to handle it. In the next month or two, the InfoSec team will be reaching out to all of the teams to setup virtual phishing webinars covering the information presented here, as well as more advanced techniques and examples. These webinars will be short but extensive, while offering time to ask as many questions as needed.  If you would like to get a webinar setup immediately before we reach out, please contact the InfoSec team (security@14west.us) and we will be happy to set something up!  And, as always, please let us know if you have questions regarding the information provided here or processes moving forward.