Iang Jeon, adding to his reputation as one of the most sought-after "free agents" in on-line financial services, has jumped again.
After a year and a half at Liberty Financial Cos., Mr. Jeon joined Scudder Funds Marketing this month to bring a new focus and perspective to its electronic commerce strategy.
It is the latest in a rapid-fire series of career moves by this new breed of Internet star. All occurred around the mutual fund industry capital of Boston.
He brought with him Liberty Financial colleague and onetime BayBanks Inc. officer David Chase. They have grown up with the Internet as a delivery mechanism for financial transactions and information, though Mr. Jeon insisted they are less techies than they are "business people who will harness technology in support of our strategy."
An MIT-educated computer scientist with 15 years of technology and financial services experience, Mr. Jeon, 37, made his mark creating the Fidelity Investments Web site, widely admired as one of the earliest and most popular financial service destinations on the Internet.
From there he went to Forrester Research Inc., the Cambridge, Mass., firm that has studied, and wielded considerable influence over, financial companies' interactive strategies.
David Weisman, a current senior director at Forrester, said of Mr. Jeon: "He has demonstrated that, with the right team, he can put together a mutual fund site that is on the cutting edge."
At Liberty, for example, he unveiled last January an architecture for on-line services called LEAPS-Liberty Environment for Advanced Personalized Services.
Initially applied to the Stein Roe & Farnham mutual fund family and extended to other Liberty units such as Colonial Mutual Funds and Keyport Life, LEAPS surpassed many other such systems in sophistication. It included a secure mechanism for moving funds in and out of multiple accounts, including those at banks.
Ahead of just about every other financial company, Liberty relied on digital certificates (electronic equivalents of passports or driver's licenses) rather than just passwords to verify customer identity. Aside from the security benefits, the certificates assist in customizing marketing and informational pitches to investors.
The Liberty work raised Mr. Jeon's stature, and Institutional Investor magazine listed him this fall among the 20 most influential executives in Web-based financial services.
"We'll miss Iang and David, but we have a strategic vision driven from the top," said William Rice, director of marketing at Liberty.
Based in Boston, Mr. Jeon is now vice president for electronic commerce at the funds marketing arm of Scudder Stevens & Clark, New York. He reports to William Baughman, director of Scudder Funds' high-net-worth services.
Mr. Chase is vice president for planning and architecture.
The hirings show Scudder is at least as serious as Mr. Jeon's previous employers about building a more "virtual" business.
Scudder has four World Wide Web sites; they serve the Scudder Family of Funds, the AARP Investment Program, Defined Contribution Services, and Scudder Funds of Canada. Mr. Jeon said the company faces a strategic challenge to create more varied on-line services. "We're taking a look at how to create more of an electronic enterprise and to establish and maintain a leadership position," he said.
"Liberty was a fine organization, but with Scudder there was a larger opportunity," Mr. Jeon added. "Scudder has a vision of leading the charge toward electronic commerce in investment management on a global basis. I have to come up with the scudder.com strategy."
Mr. Jeon said he and Mr. Chase will be looking at a strategy that both encompasses and complements the Internet: "We'll expand the group of capabilities for interactive design to a fundamental platform technology," he said.
