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Spotlights
- How AI is Changing Banking
- ICSFS sets a new standard of scalability and proofs viable solutions for the largest banks with Oracle Exadata
- ICSFS Sees Growing Tech Adoption Among Islamic Countries
- Digital Banking
- The People’s Bank of Zanzibar Limited
- Oromia Bank Goes Live with Upgraded Solution
- The Benefits of Oracle Blockchain for Payments and Transfers
- Working with Disruption
- Trying to understand blockchain? Here's a simple explanation
- Leading and Preferred Banking Application for the MEA Region
- Hi-tech Banking
- Bankable Software
- Transformations Through Technology
- Middle East Promise
- ICS Financial Systems and Digital Banking Revolution
- Why Banks Must Digitally Transform in 2018 or Risk Fading Away
- Future Direction of Digital Investing
- Using AI to Enhance Customer Experience
- The Inevitable Evolution: Financial Inclusion, Open Banking and the Cloud
Future Direction of Digital Investing
Although digital investing is not scaling as quickly as many anticipated, customer awareness and consideration has clearly moved toward digital.
Today, about 30-35% of searches for investment products go through digital channels rather than through family and friends, word-of-mouth and other sources. To catch the shift to digital, Investment firms need to build up their digital marketing capabilities and capture their clients’ attention and consideration at the start of their investment journeys.
One question might be raised, why digital investing? Digital investing brings investments closer to the people, making them simpler and easily understandable. That should come with greater transparency, while bundled or structured investment products in the past have been characterized by opacity and hidden costs. Transparency doesn’t mean full disclosure of any single technical or legal detail of a financial instrument, but rather the investor’s right to be informed clearly and efficiently about:
If you want to simplify the saving cycle as much as possible, it is possible to focus on just two basic investment needs:
Most financial institutions seem to target the youngest generation, but they focus on the way the young use money and debt, which is of course digital, and not on why they use money, and what for. This creates some disconnect. It is how we live our daily lives that affects the way we perceive and use our money. When developing financial products, banks should work to create features that respond to their customer’s needs. However, most everyday investors and customers don’t buy product features, they buy the benefits such features involve.
To make a step forward you would need to convert benefits of financial products into emotions. Financial products are not fun, but useful, and financial product features can be translated to benefits that are compelling to customers. If you manage to convert those benefits into emotions, even boring financial products will be able to engage end-users. Unfortunately, investments are difficult to visualize, difficult to explain, and difficult to stir up emotions. But even if they are unlikely to get viral as a concept, I believe that it can become much more engaging than they are right now. With technology being the backbone of the financial markets, especially financial intermediaries, firms will continue to spend on developing their communications and technology infrastructure. In the near-term, increased competition along with emergence of high frequency trading, is expected to be the key drivers for investments in technology.
We believe digital engagement will continue to gain importance in financial instruments, and the prospect and client and experience is already becoming one of the industry’s most strong strategic weapons. That means that the race to deliver the best digital client (and prospect) experience will become even more competitive.
