Financial services are generally lagging behind in meeting mobile experiences expectations, due to factors like regulation and legacy systems, and there is a gap between where customers are spending time and where financial services businesses are focusing their value proposition.
This is according to Moshe Tamir, Global Head of Digital Transformation at Generali, who was speaking at the Discovery Financial Planning Summit yesterday at the Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg.
Tamir explained that the sector needs to move from an adviser-led, linear sales process to a customer-led, digital one. While trust remains important, he noted the process from researching to purchasing happens digitally.
"Digital migration is driving exponential growth in innovation globally. New technologies are released on an almost weekly basis and they are reinventing financial services. Technology has fundamentally shifted the way we live, from our communications to entertainment and how we do business, and there is a massive shift in customer expectations. Former Google CEO Larry Page, famously said: 'We are no longer living in a mobile-first world, we are in a mobile-only world'. People want a mobile experience," he said.
As an example, Tamir cited Lemonade - an insurance company that uses an app to give users an end-to-end mobile experience with the brand - something he terms a "pure mobile" experience.
"There are five billion mobile users around the world, more than half of them using smartphones. Social media surpasses any other Internet activity. In South Africa, there are 80 million mobile subscribers and the average user spends three hours per day on his/her device. The country is also showed rapid exceptional growth in social media users over the last two to three years. This provides massive opportunity for the financial services industry in the country to adapt by building tools for advisers to interact with clients across digital channels," he added.
Tamir cites the growing social media landscape as one of the biggest trends in the financial adviser industry. Said Tamir: "People are broadcasting their lives in social media, additions to families, travelling, change in jobs. One can even say that social media has become the 'customer relations manager' of people's lives. The challenge is how we can tap into all that big data. These will play very critical points for our insurance value propositions. We need to find a solution which can bring all this data into our financial advisory business model."
While Tamir concludes that trust is a critical element of financial services' value proposition, humans can't compete with algorithms when it comes to capturing information. "Leave the support functions to humans, where trust is required, and leverage technology for the advantages that it can offer elsewhere. If done correctly, this actually ensures that personal interactions become even more valuable. Many have created ways for clients to communicate with the company, but many are still missing the ability for clients and advisers to communicate," he noted.
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