Benjamin Ensor, argues that banks role as distributors or financial products is under threat. Forrester Research EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: 7 pages Consumers research financial products online because the Web is always available, quick, and easy and lets them research at home. Most online researchers start at search engines and then use a variety of other sites to research their financial decisions. These researchers are looking for a mix of product details, comparisons, and help choosing the right product. As most financial firms don’t provide that information, many researchers are going to independent Web sites to find the information that they want. … Continue reading Independent sites threatening to relegate financial firms to the role of manufacturers

I have been thinking a lot recently about that over-used expression, ‘customer centric’. Forrester in 2005 had a deck on the customer experience value chain. They have a high level model to express the value chain: The model displays the characteristics of a customer centric organisation,  customer familiarity field research design persona organisational engagement Since internal alignment remains a critical challenge to improving customer experience, firms can’t just rely on the nebulous notion of “executive buy-in.” To create the change necessary across the company, firms need to engage in company wide efforts that demonstrate a clear commitment to serving customer needs. … Continue reading What is ‘customer centric’, and why does it matter?

This from IBM.  Quite high level but good thought provoking stuff.  Its good in the early stages, but weaker in terms of conclusions. Conclusions are four strategic imperatives: Focus on core strengths and partner for everything else Optimize the potential of each customer relationship Harness the potential of the workforce through effective performance management Recognize that technology will be a critical element of success. Here is the Executive Summary, with pdf for full doc embedded. Any serious discussion of the future of the retail banking industry eventually raises a basic question: will future customers still need banks? The answer, it … Continue reading The Paradox of Banking 2015: Achieving more by doing less (IBM Institute for business value)

The title of this piece (pdf) from the New York Federal Reserve interested me, but now that I am reading it, the conclusions worry me in a different way! (my emphasis) Relevance to Bankwatch: Mid sized banks will suffer profit pressure, unless they make some changes to their model. These results hold for the most recent data and also back through the mid-1990s, when the number of branches in the U.S. banking system began to increase. Thus, recent technological developments such as Internet banking seem not to have altered the basic relationship between branch network size and performance. The one … Continue reading The impact of branch network size on bank profitability