ShareBanking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI)
Rewards are passé, Customer Benefits are in
Services and products your customers were delighted about eight months earlier – today, they are only happy with them. What your customers were happy about six to eight months back, are only ‘satisfactory’ for them now. Services and products they were satisfied with six months before – today, they are just tolerating them. And what they would tolerate at that time, they find it absolutely unacceptable today. Read more
See for ‘Customer Profitability’
The title is straightforward and so is the essence. You wouldn’t need Sherlock Holmes to say "Elementary". But how many financial institutions (FI) do understand this ‘Elementary’? Ask the industry pundits and nine out of ten of them would say, most of these FIs are still “Dr Watson”! Read more
Now, Bundle Them Up!
Retaining your customers is a lot less expensive than getting new ones. So, how do you keep them coming back for more? They will, if they perceive value. Mark our words; it’s all about what the customer perceives.Even if your competition is offering a particular product at a lower cost, if the customer perceives that he is getting the best deal for a product bundle, he will not move on, or will at least think twice. Read more
Revenue Assurance – stop the leak!
Revenue Leakage has been a universal phenomenon, gnawing up the profit margins of transaction-based industries. However, service providers in transaction intense industries, such as Telecom, have always been at the vanguard of embracing the best practices and the most innovative technologies in pricing and billing operations. Read more
Unified Managed Accounts – The Next Big Thing, But Not As Yet
The novel concept of Unified Managed Account (UMA) packs tremendous potential in its wings, though it is still in its infancy. Unlike a Separately Managed Account (SMA) that helps investors handle a particular type of investments only, UMAs encompass diverse portfolios that contain stocks, bonds, exchange-traded funds, mutual funds and a growing number of alternative investment choices for a single investor account within a sponsor firm. Read more
Integrated Banking at the Crossroads
Today, banks of all sizes are feeling the consequences of globalization. Cross–border banking, mergers and acquisitions, proliferation of non–banking financial institutions and online and mobile banking providers have all been contributing to the heavy competition - to grab the maximum wallet share from the customer. Read more
Setting Up Your Payments Hub Is Only The Beginning
Most banks have a 'silofied' approach to payments processing, ‘forcing’ each Customer Interaction Channel to connect to each Payment Execution System separately. Payments Hub turns a silo-based infrastructure into a nerve centre that provides more flexible end-to-end payments processing, thus reducing complexity and operating costs. Read more
Pricing - A definitive competitive advantage
Price, number 1 reason for the customer to choose a bank: Gartner
Sustaining profitable relationships with customers has now become the biggest challenge for banks. As interest revenues continue to erode, fees now play an integral part in the income of financial companies. Read more
We are seeing the whole together...
The current billing infrastructures of most large banks and financial institutions have limitations in supporting growth objectives such as customer experience and stickiness. The processes are sometimes manual, systems fragmented, and it is not uncommon to find the billing performed by several systems. This has resulted in more bill capture work, errors and leakages. Read more
SEPA - Say Positive Change
If you are a bank or a Financial Institution (FI) anywhere in Europe, you might as well be feeling the heat now! The European Union (EU), as you are aware, has embarked on an ambitious project. Aspiring to be the formidable, dynamic knowledge-based economy of the world by the year 2010, the Union of European countries has adopted several measures to radically transform its financial services industry for the better. Read more
Banking on my phone
You are at a saloon. You've just dropped in for a little trim. Yes, you do look a little shaggy around the edges. You explain the kind of haircut you want – just a touch off the front, tapered off just at the top of the ears, squared off in the back. The hairdresser snips and clips, sprays and combs, snips and clips, combs and blows. He is ready; and so are you.
You don't dip your hand into your pocket and pull out a few bills; neither do you use your cards – you stopped carrying them a long time back. Instead, you whip out your cell phone and punch in a six-digit ID number. In an instant, your phone becomes your bank. Read More
Retail Banking: Future is NOW!
Imagine you are at the grocery. You buy fruits from one vendor, vegetables from another, dry goods from another, and so on. You negotiate pricing with each vendor and depending on the volume you are purchasing and your negotiating skills you get special discounts or favorable pricing from each vendor. Regardless of how much you buy in aggregate from the bazaar, each vendor’s price to you is based only on how much you buy from that vendor.
Luckily, this is not how we buy groceries; the grocery store provides us a one-stop-shop for buying all the things we need and a single counter to pay for all that we buy.
Unfortunately, shopping for our financial needs like loans, mortgages, credit cards and basic banking services is still the same as going to a product-centric bazaar where we have to negotiate with each product provider separately. Read more