The Financial Services sector will be very significantly effected by the new Broadband Internet. We have been working with Optimos , a specialist financial services cinsultancy, to define the impact of the high speed internet on this sector. We see the following major trends emerging:
- Increasing use of video and social networks for customer acquisition, service and retention.
- Web Service based approaches going direct to end users, disnitermediating current supply chains.
- User self selection of services, driven by user communities with social network rating andrecommendadtion.
- Increasing use of multi-media approaches (Internet email, audio, video, VoiP) to winning and servicing customers.
These, and other forces will represent major discontinuous shifts to insurance companies, retail banks and merchant banks. In addition, each sector faces some major challenges of its own - here are some major trends:
- Insurers face the rise of the pro-sumer....producer-consumers who want to configure their own niche products. In addition, these new channels allow increasing disintermediation of (and from) the IFA network. As these networks are global, national boundaries will also reduce.
- Retail banks face new players with branded assets using the new channels to set up competing services, using video/high bandwidth to give a high tech/touch approach. They will also face increasing dilemmas with how best to use the expensive - to- run branch networks, and we expect many of the less valuable in-branch services to be moved onto webservices.
- Merchant banks are to an extent the most globally integrated, but despite outsourcing their IT costs are typically still high, integration is low, and their ability to use the data footprint is limited.
