IdeaPlane is the new enterprise social network on the block, targeting the finance industry

IdeaPlane is the brainchild of entrepreneur James Fabricant, one of the founding team that took MySpace global, and the new enterprise social network (ESN) aims to transform the way organisations adopt social technologies.

Launched this week with two big investment banks as founding clients, the UK-based company’s platform, IP Kinetic, has been built specifically for financial institutions and other industries that are highly regulated. It promises to enable organizations to ‘go social’ across offices located in multiple regions and audiences, including employees, alumni, clients and partners.

Given that financial organizations will be a key industry for IdeaPlane, security is a fundamental building block for the platform, to ensure that it’s regulation-compliant and can be easily integrated into existing operating systems.

“Our mission is to transform our clients’ businesses by putting a social engine at the heart of the organisation”, says Fabricant. “We saw a gap in the market for a simpler more intuitive product with a clean UI and user experience, which addressed the challenges faced by highly regulated enterprises. We believe we have created a product that will be easily embraced by stakeholders and have an immediate impact on improving workflow.”

“Our team of leading technology and financial specialists, along with my experience of launching MySpace across multiple territories means that we have been able to secure two top-10 investment banks as clients”, continues Fabricant. “It is very exciting to build a platform that brings together the best features of existing social networks and make them effective for an enterprise environment.”

IdeaPlane was founded initially way back in April 2010, when Fabricant saw an opportunity to apply what he’d learned from both a global consumer-facing social network, and from previous roles he’d held in corporate finance and corporate law. He also anticipated that that ESNs would be particularly effective during the economic downturn.

“IP Kinetic is a powerful enabler of change, that can help the most badly affected companies meet the extreme challenges of the current financial crisis,” said Fabricant. “We are able to provide sustainable solutions for these difficult times through the application of social networking concepts and technologies to the heart of a business, ones that have a significant positive operational and financial impact.”

IP Kinetic features include:

• Secure system with ‘Chinese walls’ within the ESN platform, created to comply with particular security requirements of an investment bank.
• Creation and display of user profiles, status updates and activity newsfeeds.
• Ability to create private or open groups to facilitate information sharing.
• Newsfeed providing updates from ESN connections.
• Broadcasters tool allowing users to control who they follow and how information is delivered to them.
• Searchable profiles tool, enabling users to search connections by particular topics, for example expertise, interest-graph etc.
• Powerful recommendation engine to help users connect with relevant people and content.
• Recruitment platform and job posting board to streamline talent management processes.
• Messaging system, enabling individuals and groups to communicate on a one-to-one or one-to-many basis. Messages can be set as private or public, and can be seamlessly linked with company email systems.

In addition to its ESN platform, IdeaPlane is also offering consulting services to enterprises and small-to-medium sized businesses looking to implement their own ESN solutions.