An engaging customer?
We tweeted last week about the launch event of Allmyplans.com – a new venture begat from the creators of Webline and Quay (amongst others).
The new service is attempting to do something that is actually quite tricky for the financial services space – be interesting and relevant to a growing population of tech-savvy, time poor consumers – consumers who use google, Facebook, MySpace and other internet enabled tools daily.
When I was working at The Exchange on Exweb it was around the time moneyextra.com was created – a classic B2C infomediary service, with comparison engines, links to providers and manufacturers and about 8 years too early. It wasn’t that moneyextra.com didn’t cut the mustard, it was that it struggled to be relevant and didn’t engage the consumer well enough and the impact of the internet of consumer behaviour was still low. After a relatively short period of time, moneyextra.com changed hands, became a conduit advice service for the Bank of Ireland and its UK subsidiaries, changed hands a couple more times and is now an authorised IFA owned by a number of private investors. Over the last five years, there’s been an explosion of comparative sites, gocompare, moneysupermaket et al all of whom have made great in roads to providing routes to market for, mainly, commodity products with personal lines business being at the top of the tree.
What has been missing in these propositions is a compelling digital offering that engages consumers for more complex financial planning needs and routes through to advice. There are a number of solution vendors who are trying to make the grade and the sort of innovation being developed is really quite head turning.
Take 1st – The Exchange – they have recently launched Advice Navigator (AdNav) – they recognised that a better route to consumer engagement was a slick, relevant and informative user interface that wasn’t constrained by static website builds – so using some cutting-edge technologies, mainly Microsoft’s SilverLight, they have developed a platform that delivers some very attractive results – now, link that with all the heritage of the transactional services delivered to their traditional B2B service, Exweb, you really start to motor. So, as a provider, you are able to produce a visually attractive proposition, capture client information subtly during the screen interaction and then draw the consumer through a compliant selection and fulfilment process – nice and straight-through.
Now if you extend that approach to create a platform that can be tailored for an individual IFA’s needs, present a robust consumer-facing web presence coupled with a industrial strength back office, you can start to change the way the consumer accesses products and services. One of the smart things that the Allmyplans team has decided on is to allow access to a vast array of product provider central systems without dictating any particular approach or technology. Despite there being standards for this type of activity, Allmyplans are clever enough to realise that the variations are huge and that the pragmatic approach is take anything the provider throws at them, including paper.
What is clear is that consumers are becoming increasingly reliant on internet delivered services for other parts of their lives, but interaction with financial practioners is still trapped in late-sixties technology approaches – and that has to change, as the risks of new approaches, like goole’s recent announcement of the extension of google finance, might well overtake traditional advice models. What’s interesting too, is that google don’t appear to have the inhibitors that Microsoft have (had) with regard to providing value-added services in their own right – we mentioned a few weeks ago Microsoft Money – it never really worked, but mainly because it didn’t go far enough (and it was tortuous!).
With the new offerings hitting the market now, either for direct to consumer propositions for the larger institutions, or enabling platforms for fleet of foot distributor firms it’s going to be interesting times to see if they can capture the consumers’ heart and minds.
Written by Nigel Smith - Visit Website