Aptus Consultants

Ask a member of the public to describe financial services companies and you can be pretty sure that adjectives such as ‘dull’, ‘grey’ & ‘boring’ will crop up with monotonous regularity. Now we could argue as to whether such characterisation is fair, but the truth is that the web experience provided by the big financial service providers does nothing to dispel the perception that our industry has all the charisma of a wake!

We recently undertook a review of the websites of the 10 leading UK Life & Pension providers and of the 10 leading Investment and Asset Management companies. The review did not look at the design, aesthetics or navigation of the sites, but purely at whether they featured certain, specific elements (e.g. RSS newsfeeds). We then totalled the number of instances of such elements to see if they were present:

• In more than 50% of sites (green)
• In between 20% and 50% of sites (yellow)
• In less than 20% of sites (red)

The results are shown below:

As you can see, all the classic ‘web 1.0’ elements are there such as product, fund and company information. However, the tools which might make that information come alive such as video and audio are rarely if ever deployed.

When it comes to web transactions, a depressing number of companies still limit their online application process to offering the customer the option to download a PDF of the application form, rather than offering true online processing. Most companies do offer customers the option to see what products they already hold but few offer the ability to administer them in any way.

However, the extent to which provider sites are behind the curve really becomes apparent when we look at the presence, or more accurately the absence, of modern engagement tools such as blogs, content aggregation or user feedback. These tools are commonly used elsewhere to help ensure that the user enjoys a useful, engaging and interactive experience that not only maintains their immediate attention but helps ensure a future return visit. It is also precisely these tools which Datamonitor identified as being needed by FS providers if they want to rebuild the trust of their clients.

We would suggest three common reasons why providers not incorporating these increasingly important elements:

• The mistaken belief that they present an insurmountable compliance risk. While use of such tools does indeed raise some additional compliance challenges, they are all manageable so long as companies focus on the content of the message being delivered, as oppose to worrying about the means of delivery.
• The concern that inclusion of such elements will alienate intermediaries. However, a recent Mintel report suggested that 39% of people use the web to validate the financial advice they have received. Thus providing easy access to information to confirm that which has been provided by an IFA would in fact support intermediated sales.
• The fear of being the first mover. Well bad news people, there are already a whole bunch of big brand ‘new’ providers who are deploying exactly these tools as part of their wider plans to grab market share.

So are we likely to see the providers adopting these engagement techniques anytime soon? I doubt it somehow. Still, as W. Edwards Deming said “It is not necessary to change.  Survival is not mandatory.”