In brief
Financial service providers ignore their growth potential in the pension market
We identified six crucial dimensions that determine the capacity to stand out – presenting considerable improvement opportunities across all of them
Read our report to find out how to maximize your potential with five measures
Intro
Financial service providers ignore their growth potential in the pension market
The study by the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences has shown that there is significant growth potential in the Swiss investment market. From our work with numerous financial service providers in Switzerland, we have developed three theses on how providers can exploit this potential:
- Developing intelligent digital solutions is the enabler for managing the growth market of private pension provision successfully
- Financial services providers have not yet fully realized that the Internet has given post-Baby Boomer generations many options for how they can use their money instead of simply trusting it to a bank
- Financial service providers need to fundamentally change their way of thinking as they are currently overvaluing their processes and products and undervaluing the interests of customers
Based on these theses, we analyzed the Swiss pension market (with a focus on established providers).
Six dimensions decide whether a financial service provider is able to stand out
We carried out a thorough analysis of Swiss Pillar 3a applications.
Based on our own extensive industry experience, we know that the following six dimensions strongly shape customer perception: first impression, cost transparency, education, onboarding, availability and language.
The better a service provider prioritizes and masters these key dimensions, the higher the chances of success.
It should be emphasized that the companies analyzed only differ slightly when it comes to their core competence of investment products. Therefore, this aspect of the analysis was not included in the results.
There is great improvement potential for providers across all dimensions
In general, providers find it difficult to deliver user experiences that really captivate and engage their users. Even the relatively best companies did not perform well in our test. The average value for all financial service providers is only 2.8. Even if you take the highest value per dimension, you only get an average of 3.9, which shows the substantial potential for improvement for the providers analyzed.
The industry's poor overall result stem from the following issues:
- Communication is not at eye level, customers don’t understand
what the providers are trying to convey - The user experience suffers as providers typically adopt an inside-out approach driven by legal and compliance requirements
- Providers operate under the false assumption that users act
rationally and that facts and figures influence their decisions
Conclusion
Maximize your potential with five measures
Think from the outside in
- Explicitly focus on the core needs of different generations in process design and UX/UI
- Start consistently with the question: what do customers want and how can we make it easy for them to get/use/find it?
Communicate like a media company
- Similar to how media companies bring facts to life through stories
- Bringing offers to life through emotions instead of creating boredom with dry facts
Act like a technology company
- In the spirit of fail-fast, implement innovative solutions that generate customer benefit in a timely manner
