Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Flaws in advice system revealed by ASIC report

Does the below article suggests change is coming ?

http://www.financialstandard.com.au/news/view/12787507/

Evolution in Wealth Management



I was asked the other day why mass tailored portfoio management is going to be important, and so put together a slide that tries to depict such.

In short, we are experiencing two key trends that taking increasing priority in the business world today:

1) consumerism is shifting to customised offers, to be in 'context' of the consumer. This trend is highighted in the world of non physical delivery (ie music, financial services etc)

2) the need for scale for growth, or perhaps even survival in times of reducing margins. With this in mind, business today is seeking to eek out inefficiency and come up with 'unconstrained' or 'very elastic' operational models (There are probrally better phrases - comments invited).

So if we look at wealth management, where it started, where it has been, and given the above, where it is going, we end up with something like on the attached diagram.

THe questions we have to answer as an industry:

a) what happens to a lot of the current offers when 'client centric' becomes a standard, not just a premium service (just think what happened when itunes was introduced) ?
b) what happens when industry participants industrialise the process to the point where they can offer client centric offers at a very attractive price point ?

Does this make the lower left four boxes look redundant ? What are those participants going to have to do to remain relevant ?