Earlier this week, something caught our corporate eye that we thought interesting.
Martyn Lewis, founder of MoneySavingExpert, has collected over 100,000 signatures in a petition to make financial education a compulsory subject in schools – see his e-petition page here. He also references this site from his homepage and at the time of writing the number has reached 102, 284.
One of the dynamics that steers the distribution of financial products in the UK is the social attitude that consumers adopt – in the North American space, there are emerging a number of technology-based initiatives that enable the provision of limited or zero-advice models, using the newer techniques of social media, eg Facebook, Twitter; this is coupled with the acceptance of aggregation engines, such as Yodlee etc. that enable a focused, one-stop shop of everyday finance and the identification and fulfillment of need.
Now, we have yet to see in UK a successful venture of this kind – there seems to be an inhibition that is two-pronged:
1. The well-worn adage of complex products being ‘sold and not bought’, which is manifested by the consumer being reluctant, unmotivated or uneducated to self-serve;
2. The inertia from a regulatory and legislative perspective to draw together disparate threads of financial information and service provision, ie banking, insurances, utilities etc.
There have been attempts to create services that address the needs described above, with established solutions’ providers wrestling with consumer-speak and simplified product tracks – indeed, Yodlee has had a presence in the UK for at least 7 years, but nothing of significance has emerged.
We think the time is ripe, given the direction in which the market is traveling in terms of the regulatory environment post-2012, for the emergence of service providers to drive direct to consumer propositions that bring together modern, social media techniques, simplified advice provide conduits to high-value, advice expertise.
We are aware of a couple of initiatives in the pipeline, so will consumers enage sufficiently to cause the tide to turn and can it be done with minimal consumer risk’?
