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Good prospects for banks?
The Fraunhofer Institute recently took a peek into the future with its trend analysis "Bank & Zukunft 2010" (Bank & Future 2010). The "Competence Center Sourcing in the Financial Industry" (CC Sourcing) at the Universities of St. Gallen and Leipzig has cast its focus as far as 2015. Both studies are based on surveys of managers from all banking groups, although the Fraunhofer IAO concentrates on Germany, while CC Sourcing additionally covers Austria and Switzerland. Here"s a quick overview of some of their most important findings:
The effects of the financial market crisis naturally play a major role in both studies. The majority of managers surveyed by Fraunhofer IAO believe that they weathered the crisis very well. On average, 53 percent of those surveyed claimed that they emerged from the crisis even stronger. This assessment coincides with the recently published stress test results, which demonstrated that the German banking system"s average core capital ratio has increased by just under two percentage points in the last three years. However, participants in the CC Sourcing study believe that the crisis will speed up consolidation in the industry and further erode margins.
Networks push business
Providers of innovative business models in areas such as social banking have particularly strong potential, as do comprehensive problem solvers. For this reason, both studies agree that banks will not be able to avoid cooperating with these groups. Fraunhofer IAO calls this trend "Banking goes (a)cross". Survey participants saw the greatest potential for innovation and problem solving in insurance (87 percent) and building societies (78 percent). The CC Sourcing study encourages banks to create interface organisations. In the future, dominant banks will be able to use these so-called "retained organisations" to control networks that provide customers with tailored cross-channel services. These services will be partially performed internally, but according to Fraunhofer IAO, a growing lack of internal resources will cause many companies to resort to external partners. Ultimately, both studies equally target distributed value creation, which is still the exception rather than the rule in the banking world.
Mobile and social are the trend
Providers need to be more than just comprehensive problem solvers; methods of reaching customers are becoming increasingly numerous and diverse. Young, tech-savvy groups in particular want to interact with their banks via new (mobile) technologies, says CC Sourcing. For this reason, the managers surveyed by the institute believe that electronic customer interfaces need to be based on central IT service infrastructures that rely on distributed systems. The Fraunhofer IAO study also concluded that interaction between banks and their customers will become a greater focus of the business. As early as this year, 54 percent of the institutions are planning investments in online sales channels, followed by investments in better multi-channel integration. According to the study, the use of new technologies, particularly social software solutions, will also play a major role.
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