As financial products directly affect the economic well-being of their users, they must be polished nearly to perfection by everyone involved. Everything, from the range of services to digital clients responsible for the direct provision of the services, must be clear, convenient, flexible, and effective. The absence of such characteristics can often lead to the customers’ general dissatisfaction and lower turnover. One of the key reasons for the financial products being inconvenient or ineffective for customers is the insufficient attention the provider of such products gives to those products, which is, in turn, caused by the provider attempting to be effective with all of them at once.
This is one of the main factors financial products and services have been subject to the processes of unbundling and re-bundling within the previous several years. Essentially, many providers of financial services developed a tendency to focus only on a single or a few services instead of providing all of them for the past 15 years or so. While such a tendency would not seem attractive or convenient either, it led to a whole new era for financial services as the providers began to re-bundle the services once again.
Image taken from Pexels
The crucial aspect here is that many of those providers managed to perfect their approach to a variety of services and develop a solid base for them all as they focused on each of them enough. As a result, the majority of modern financial services tend to be:
- Digitally bound, i.e. being available to the customer nearly everywhere anytime. E-banking apps are currently developing and becoming so effective that they might even replace some physical bank branches and outlets after some time.
- Personalized, which means that every customer can use the service they need the way they see fit and adjust all aspects and parameters to their personal needs. In other words, the customers only need to know what exactly they expect from financial services and enter those values in the fields of their app.
- Response-stimulating as such services become so easy to use, the customers actually find time to understand how they work. This, in turn, leads to the customers’ “tech-savviness” and ability to adapt to the situation regarding all imaginable aspects.
The experience of unbundling and re-bundling of services in finance demonstrates that in order to stimulate substantial progress, the whole system must be decomposed, studied, and experimented with thoroughly, and then reassembled again for much greater results. While it might not work for some areas of the economy or for certain industries, the process appears not to be too long and risky, especially in the digital age.
Modern times provide flexibility deemed impossible just some 30 years ago. The big difference was in the capability of digital technologies back them, which multiplied by millions, if not billions, of times through all these years. Essentially, the niche of financial services managed to complete an almost impossible task for the past two decades. So, there’s no reason any other would not handle this challenge as well.