The rapid, turbulent and continuous change in the financial sector has forced providers of financial services to look to new marketing models to enhance their competitive position. Facing tough challenges, the industry is now seeing a positive step change towards better customer servicing.
Good customer databases, highly targeted and persuasive communications, consistently high levels of personalised services and a range of products that deliver against customer requirements are emerging from what has been overall financial instability and fragility underpinned by systemic and wide spread governance issues. This is forcing better customer centric practices that benefit the public at large.
Financial Services brands traditionally marketed specific products and services to their customer base, but over time have realised that customers in general are not proactively looking to switch banking providers unless there is either a problem or if a product has reached maturity. This traditional ‘marketing push’ approach has now shifted to a focus on customer needs and to improving the customer experience in an effort to sustain competitive advantage.
This new and intense focus on customers can bring about its own risks. For example, moving large quantities of customer data to a Cloud solution raises questions about security and confidentiality, which in turn could result in tarnishing the credibility and trust that a brand holds.
Banks have traditionally controlled IT in-house, keeping data behind firewalls. They generally operate sophisticated data centre facilities, and connect to inter-banking systems such as Swift, the payment-messaging platform, cash machine networks and BACS (banker’s automated clearing system). But financial services firms could soon make more use of public cloud platforms with shared infrastructure such as Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services.
Chris Swan, CTO of security at UBS, says financial services companies are already using public cloud for non-core activities but a greater stumbling block is the regulations preventing cloud adoption. “Financial services are heavily regulated. Although the main concern is security, in practice some of the jurisdictional and regulatory issues are more of a practical barrier.”
Luke Scanlon, a technology law expert from the firm ‘Out-Law’, said that UK investment firms need to ensure that the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has ‘effective access’ to the ‘business premises’ of cloud providers in cases where the firms intend to store data relating to ‘critical or important operational functions or of any investment services or activities’ in the cloud.
How does this impact today’s Financial Services Marketer?
Melvin Day, Director at Marketingmoves said, ‘The Financial Sector requires outstanding marketers who have industry knowledge, product marketing and management skills,” When we place marketers in Financial Services we look for a very specific set of capabilities. Inherently, the candidates must proactively search for and be able to implement solutions which will help their organization develop a better and more sustainable customer focus.” He continued, “Knowing how to work within industry regulations and to work alongside the CIO or the CTO to use a Cloud solution is the sort of skill and knowledge base that we expect from our senior marketers. Marketing in this sector is unique, and opportunities and risks, such as holding customer data in the Cloud require marketers who understand the technology that can ultimately be used to create long-term shareholder value”
To recruit marketing teams to work in your Financial Services organisation contact Melvin Day on +441932 253352 or mday@marketingmoves.com.
