Banks today have little choice but to improve customer relations wherever they occur – with a teller in a branch, online, with a call center agent, or at the ATM. The sheer number of interactions taking place between a bank and a customer make ‘improving customer relations’ feel like a daunting task. Most banks are left wondering where to start.Ten years ago, if a customer had a bad experience at a financial services institution (FSI), they might have told a handful of friends and family about it.  Today, with the rise of social media, a bad experience can be relayed to thousands of people while it’s happening.  Read More »

Our proprietary Business Alignment Survey and Anatomy of a World-Class Capital Markets Organization diagnostic are self-assessment tools available to our members to measure the effectiveness of IT operations. They are each administered via a survey completed by senior leaders in your organization. We analyze the data and provide your organization with a personalized report of your survey results, including a consultation with a Research Director to offer support and guidance on how to address improvement opportunities, and provide assistance in developing next steps for your organization. Read More »

Global payment brands American Express, Discover, MasterCard and Visa, will process more than $10 Trillion in payments in 2012. We expect trends will continue through at least 2016 and envision that the branded card business will surpass $20 trillion in spending by 2017.

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Since entering the market, Order Management Systems (OMS) and Execution Management Systems (EMS) have provided tremendous value to buy-side firms. These technologies facilitate the end-to-end processing of the trade lifecycle by improving order management and trade execution workflow efficiencies, while also connecting the desk to key investment functions. In our proprietary survey of 200,000 financial services executives, 81% of respondents confirmed that these technologies provide high value to their firms. Read More »

In “Part I: The ATM” of our “Benchmarking the Delivery Channels“ series, (survey is still accessible), less than one third of senior Retail Banking Executives  had complete confidence in non-Branch channels as a substitute to current branch service (with “Mobile” scoring the lowest at less than one sixth).  Clearly, the Branch remains a key pillar in serving the customer, but protecting service levels while facing the realities of lower margins and profitability demands that evolution is required through changes in roles, technology and customer expectations. Read More »

Although there were signs of recovery in the first half of 2011, flagging economic growth and the escalation of the European Sovereign Debt Crisis in the second half of the year hampered robust lending growth in most developed economies.  In direct contrast with these market conditions is the increased demand for commercial credit in the first quarter of 2012 reported by a net majority of US banks, spurred in part because US banks have loosened lending standards for eight consecutive quarters.  Read More »

Back in January, the Capital Markets team presented its annual list of “Top 10 Technology Initiatives for 2012,” and one of the leading initiatives that we identified was the adoption of new technology and the implementation of innovative IT. Prior to the financial crisis, securities firms were spending about three percent per annum on new innovative technology projects; by 2011, that amount was reduced to half a percent, and zero for many firms. This year, however, the combination of a challenging macroeconomic environment and a business landscape being redrawn by regulations  will spur financial institutions to adopt new IT approaches. Read More »

For property & casualty insurers, the increase from a 92.5% combined loss ratio in 2006 to 109.6% in 2011 warrants a call for action. Traditional pricing and underwriting strategies for financial improvement are severely curtailed in 2012.  Claims organizations must step into the gap and deliver new sources of income and prevent precious premium dollars from leaking out of the organization. Given the complexity of today’s claims environment, generalized actions are not sufficient and drilling down cannot be done manually. Anecdotally, 80% of all claims data is unstructured, which makes spreadsheet analysis of standard data ineffective.   Read More »

When we first looked at Square, the mobile payments device that attaches to the iPhone, we were confident that this was more than a neat piece of technology looking for a solution.  The device, found at retailer stores for about $9, allows anyone to swipe a credit card payment onto an iPhone (or iPad), and then use a free app to process a payment.  PayPal announced their version of the product last week; it is certain these devices will become ubiquitous for small merchants and Person-to-Person payments. Read More »

When asked about the confidence they have in their financial providers, 37% of mass market consumers and 36% of mass affluent consumers indicated they had little or none.  52% of these same consumers felt negatively about their level of savings and 44% felt the same about their debt level.  The verdict?  Consumers are concerned about their finances and many of them don’t believe that their financial services institutions (FSIs) can help.  Read More »