Jeremy: In terms of your own personal investment journey, can you pick out any areas that have changed as a result of digitalisation?
Ashley: I have an IFA and various investments that are largely managed on the Transact platform though I also use Hargreaves Lansdown and have some direct investments (in Fundsmith and shares I own in companies via an EIS for example).
There are two areas I can immediately see that could be dramatically improved:
Firstly the user interfaces, particularly on mobile, are still generally quite poor and getting the answers to seemingly simple questions is unnecessarily hard.
Secondly, I’m sure some basic application of AI and benchmarking data, could provide me with some insights that my IFA might not want to draw my attention to. Am I paying them too much? How well are they managing my money compared to others? Generally I think more of us might trust machines more than humans than we care to admit!
Financial services companies are generally in a place where they recognise the importance of ‘digital’ but feel they don’t know how to become more digital. How can they?
Fundamentally I believe being ‘digital’ is about being customer-centric. Look at the likes of Amazon or Google and you’ll see an absolute obsession with the customer experience through their DNA.
Most large organisations, including financial services, have paid lip service to ‘customer-centricity’ for a long time. But it feels now like things are changing.
If you achieve the real conviction that focusing on the customer really is the route to profits and success, then the next big battle is talent – attracting and empowering the right people.
We’ve seen entire industries disintermediated by online technology. That hasn’t happened to retail investing but what can we learn from sectors where end consumers are now served more directly?
I think everyone in the value chain can, and should, up their game in digital. I have investments that are mediated by an IFA, then by an online platform, and then the underlying fund or shares. They do a variously okay job at each stage. But only okay. Each could be so much better.
That doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll cut out the intermediaries as they can still add value, digitally and physically, but I might. Those new propositions could compete on lower prices through improved efficiency (in the same way as e-tailers are out-competing many multichannel retailers) and/or through better experiences and convenience.
Will the impact of digitalisation be most profound on the services offered to consumers or the marketing of those services?
Definitely the services themselves in the long term. Right now digital is being felt perhaps most immediately in the marketing. But I believe that marketing itself is changing so that there is a much greater emphasis on product/service design and optimising the customer experience. So increasingly the service IS marketing.
The theme for the conference is ‘keeping up with the customer’ – do you see areas where consumer behaviour is moving away from what companies are offering?
The customer is invariably ahead of organisations. Our expectations are set, and raised, by the last best experience we had. So we’re all competing with Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and so on. So that’s hard.
There are two areas in particular where I think consumer behaviour is way ahead of what companies are offering.
Firstly, mobile. Most companies have mobile-optimised their websites and email templates. But that is it. Meanwhile customers are massively adopting messaging apps, buying via their phones, managing their lives via various dedicated apps.
Secondly, around expectations of speed, including ‘realtime’. Consumers want things now. We want to see the taxi driving towards us in realtime now thanks to Uber, we expect to know how busy a venue is right now thanks to Google, we expect things to be delivered near instantaneously thanks to Amazon, we expect to be able to chat with our bank straight away rather than get stuck in some call centre queue.
Ashley will present the digital marketing keynote presentation at the D2C & Digital Investing conference on 29th June 2017. His presentation will explore one of the biggest challenges for companies looking to become more ‘digital’– how to organise internal teams and capabilities successfully. He has spent almost 20 years understanding how to make digital a success and will share his insights and learning. To hear from Ashley and other great speakers about how to keep up with the customer at D2C & Digital Investing 2017 register here…
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