Financial Services Technology Trends: 2012 and Beyond

The emerging technologies such as cloud, mobile and social media provide both opportunities and challenges to financial services organizations (FSOs) in present high cost and tight economy. The overarching technology themes suggest that the current focus is to invest resources only in customer-centric platform and infrastructure consolidation technologies in order to present the “organization-as-a-whole” view to customer for a better customer experience. This post highlights the eight salient emerging themes in FST adoption.

Customer Information Management

The emerging themes in the customer information management are: Customer Information Consolidation, Customer Context Awareness, and Customer Process Standardization. Despite economic crisis and tight economy, FSOs seem to investment in customer platform. There is also a considerable trend in multi-channel support for better interaction with the customer and also for settling the returning/new business without unnecessary involvement of a staff.

Business Intelligence

Focus on business intelligence is to improve front office processes and decision making by recognising customer buying behaviour. There is an indication of capturing customers' channel and buying behaviour and organisation-wdie decision making automation for effective customer engagement.

Mobile Banking

The key trend is to adopt contactless NFC mobile payment services and close the gap between the financial institutions and customers. Allow customers to manage their accounts and payments through their mobile devices. A number of banks are embracing P2P technology allowing customers to make payments such as transfer money from one account to any other account via web or mobile channels - i.e. Google Wallet and  pre-paid Google card.

Green IT

There is a noticeable trend to develop green IT strategy for reducing energy waste and establishing sustainable environment. However, there is also need of a technology or metering service to track and measure the real cost and benefits of green IT initiatives.

Core Capability

In the present economic crisis and tight economy, the trend would be to leverage existing resources in order to achieve capital and operational efficiencies. The noticeable themes are: virtualization, data centres consolidation, private cloud deployment and infrastructure remediation. 

Security

The security of customers’ information is of supreme importance when choosing between private and public cloud offerings in the areas of customer sensitive information. Market events review, dynamic 2nd factor authentication, biometric security and voice authentication are the items to consider.

Integration

Shift is to provide a simple and integrated view of the organisational processes and systems to both the customer and employees as opposed to having a fragmented view. Focus seems to take the best solution and then deploy it across the organization i.e. Single sign-on, architecture reforms, integrating digital and physical channels and integrating partner-powered services are the key items to name for your IT strategy agenda.

Social Media 

The growing themes of social media use in FSOs are: peer to peer interactions, social media integration with CRM systems, social media to reach out to customers, brand awareness, customer acquisition, brand loyalty, need-based conversation, internal collaboration, external customer and partner collaboration and social media integrated marketing strategy.  

Summary 

The above analysis suggested that the current trends and priorities, from customer platform perspective, are front office customer relationship management system, decision support system, collaboration tools, multi-level security and mobile payment systems. Whereas, from the core capability or infrastructure perspective, the current trends and priorities are green IT, virtualisation, cloud and shared services.