orm thought leadership in financial services

Thought leadership - digital & financial services

Locations

ORM is…An award-winning digital agency composed of thinkers, creators and innovators. 

We lead brands through digital change to confidently face the future.

Using data and insight to inform our thinking, we architect strategies, platforms and applications across owned media.

We enable our clients to take advantage of tomorrow, while generating meaningful value for them today.

• Part of the Howard Hunt Group

• Group revenue £75m+

• Group employees 450+

• Established and profitable

Our services Our group

Clients

• Strategy and insight

• Experience design

• Content strategy and delivery

• Technology and development

• Client Services

ORM

• Head Office: London Bridge, London

• Project Office: Kings Cross, London

• Development Team: Wroclaw, Poland

GROUP

• Head Office: Dartford, Kent

• US Office: Boston, USA

• Europe Office: Madrid, Spain

• Based in London with 70 staff

• Adobe, Sitecore and EPiServer partner

• RAR Mobile Agency of the Year 2014

• Top 25 UK Agency - Drum Financial Report 2015

• Best FTSE 100 Website award in 2014 for RBS.com

• ISO9001 and ISO27001 accredited

Some facts Clients Locations

Digital trends in financial services as a whole

Convenience

Trends from retail are now increasing expectations in financial services

$83bn —

is lost each year in poor customer experiences

(IBM)

62% —

Smartphone penetration in the UK - Europe

increase 10-20% YoY

We’ve become mobile first

72% of smartphone owners

use applications ona daily basis

92% —

of UK smartphone users browse the internet daily

on their device

25% —

of smartphone owners would rather give up

their PC than their mobile

34% —

of UK smartphone users spend as more time on their mobile as their PC

52% growth in tablet

ownership; faster than PCs experienced

84% of mobile device

owners browse while watching TV

Wealthy individuals are digital natives

48hrs —

HNWIs spend this many hours online per

week, on 4 devices

$2500 —

is the average one-off online expensive

purchase by HNWIs

45% —

luxury buyers influenced by online videos and tailored

content

$4m —

those with a net worth in excess of this tend to be the most digitally savvy

65% —

highlight the value of online collaboration

80% —

of European HNWIs use search engines to find

what they need

92% —

consider digital tech as a major source of ongoing

wealth generation

They use social to research and make decisions

4% —

of investors currently interact with their adviser

on social media

52% —

of investors said they would connect with their adviser on social media

30% —

use social to recommend a financial product

or service

28% —

perceive a financial company as innovative if they offer social tools

34% —

subscribe to finance-related blogs

44% —

seek advice to help make a financial decision

33% —

use social media to re-evaluate a financial

decision that has already been made

46% —

follow a recognised industry expert/exec

on social media

By 2015, “digital natives” will hold the majority of buying power in the economy, and by 2025,

they will dominate UK savings capacity

– PWC

Revolution is coming to your cyberspace very soon!

Timing (years)

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

50

0 1 2 3 4 5

Imp

act

(% c

han

ge

in d

igit

al b

usi

nes

s)

Realestate

Professional services

Finance

ICT and media

retail trade

Arts and recreation Government services

Utilities

Recruitment and cleaning

Transport and post

Health

Education

Agriculture

Mining

Manufacturing

Construction

Wholesale tradeAccommodation and food services

Short fuse, Big Bang

32% of the economy

Long fuse, Big Bang

33% of the economy

Long fuse, Small Bang

18% of the economy

Short fuse, Small Bang

17% of the economy

Audience needs are changing

Consumers to lower-tier intermediaries

Authenticity and simplicity

• More retail focus to content

• Features and benefits • Peer to peer advice • Educational tools • Experts as personalities

All expect

Hyper-convenience

• Digital self-service • Multiple media types • Responsive and adaptive • Specific touchpoints for

specific tasks

Intermediaries to institutions

Accessible expertise and the inside track

• Audience specific portals • Thought leadership hubs • Advice centres • Access to experts

All expect

More relevance

• Need based navigation • Personalisation • Content syndication

Banking

Customers are demanding innovative digital capabilities to access financial products and are willing to pay for services they believe will offer more convenience and value

• Telephone banking - HSBC call volumes down 5% in 2014 after a 4% drop in 2013

• Branches operated by the UK’s retail banks shrunk by +25% in the last 20 years

• Only 16% of customers don’t use online or mobile banking*

• 39% of SMEs use online at least once a day, 69% at least once a week and 79% at least once a month. Only 7% never use

• 69% currently use the internet to purchase financial products ***

• 6% via a mobile device.

• Nearly 90% of Tesco Bank’s sales currently online

*YouGov polling carried out for the BBA **Accenture Survey *** PwC survey of 3,000 banking customers in 9developed and emerging markets

Banking habits are changing rapidly

Joint ventures

• JV with Monitise,  "investing in, building and scaling fintech businesses with the potential to redefine and support financial services globally."

• Access to Monitise's new cloud-based platform connecting banks to digital innovation for their customers

• Opportunity to partner with Santander • Santander set up $100 million fund last year to invest in fintech startups too

https://www.bcgperspectives.com

Winning Banks in 2020 will…

Browsing states, learning from other sectors

Advice

Commercial

Inspiration

In your industry

Help and Advice Transacting Future Gazing

Take the logo off and they all look the same…

Homepage trends

• Homepage content is focusing on customer’s needs/tasks rather than actual products

• Carousels and banners are being replaced by images aimed at engaging customers on an emotional level

• The primary navigation tends to show fewer links, to clearly displaying the products range

• ‘Mobile first’ approach and responsive websites are a given

• Homepages are de-cluttered, making space for highly relevant tasks and content

• Innovation – getting customers involved in the digital process through crowdsourcing and feedback

• Seamless journeys and a strong brand identity link up online and offline experience

Mobile first

Content led

Innovative UX & design

Asset Management

The UK investment management industry is at a turning point. Traditional active managers have already had to adapt to institutional changes, but

now face a confluence of retail trends”

– Deloitte, Seismic shifts in investment management

Your industry is being disrupted

Individual Responsibility

Concern of high costs and

low returns

Increasing requirement for

international products

“Retailisation”Asset

Managers going direct

New kinds of intermediaries

Disruptive wealth creation

models

Technology

The trend to go direct at volume is growing

New entrants Your peers

“Nutmeg targets 100k users by Q2 2015” The group raised £19m from investors including Schroders

“Investec to launch a rival to Nutmeg” Wealth manager is setting up a discretionary investment platform later this year. Wednesday 06 May 2015

“Barclays plans D2C offering for 2015” Monday 07 July 2014

“Hargreaves to launch D2C discretionary service to plug advice gap” Wednesday 03 September 2014

New investment models

Q2 2015: eToro raising an additional $12million The total investment volume raised among the investors amounted to $39 million. Funding circle fund £623,610,260 worth of loans so far

New investment models

Peer-to-peer lending: £838 million and helping both borrowers and lenders get great rates.

How are brands meeting needs?

Always on

• Real-time performance

• Responsive and adaptive

• Specific touch points for specific tasks

Accessible advice

• ‘Retail’ style thought leadership hubs

• Online access to professionals

• Educational tools

Peer investing

• Find and follow investors

• Transparent performance

• Peer comments, advice and sharable info

D2C platforms

• Audience specific portals

• Digital self-service

• Needs based navigation

• Digital transactional portals

Data informed investment

• Data informed client acquisition

• Personalisation

• Content syndication

• Intermediary tools

Closing the ‘advice gap’“A 'fundamental step-change' is required in order to make financial advice accessible to those with portfolios below £100,000”

“For the average person in the UK accessing advice is very difficult and they are left with two choices, one is to do nothing, which I would advocate is not a great idea, or move to DIY investing solutions.” – Chris Williams, founder, Wealth Horizon

Accessible advice

Digitising investment selection and management

The move provides increased accessibility and transparency, but reduces the opportunity for AMs to effectively cross and up-sell their services

• Platforms reached record highs in the fourth quarter of 2014 as upcoming pension freedoms and demand for income boosted inflows

D2C platforms

Advisers using tablets as productivity tools

“Clients can access our comprehensive range of tools and economic research, as well as analysis across all asset classes, including equities, foreign exchange, fixed income, emerging markets, and futures and options.

On-the-Go brings intermediaries all our fund information, market insights and videos.”

Which audience should we be focusing on in the digital space?Artemis mainly focuses on its individuals audience with its website.

Which audience should we be focusing on in the digital space?BlackRock’s digital presence focuses more on intermediaries and institutional audiences. Institutional content is particularly strong with specialist events for pension funds with online registration. There are video viewpoints from subject matter experts on themes such as sustainable investing and Beta strategies.

Which audience should we be focusing on in the digital space?M&G iView and Learning Matters focuses on intermediaries and specifically lower tier IFAs. These are starved of face to face contact and need help running their businesses.

Regular macro-ecomomic trends starting to appear on asset manager’s content pages

Guest writersJP Morgan provides advice within its insights section from notable financial advice columnists, such as here where Ian Cowie from the Sunday Times talks about the structural advantages of income trusts.

Owned digital magazines

• Insight pieces are finely segmented

• Different interest areas reflect make up of major FS online content providers like Morningstar

• Overviews, funds, viewpoints, retirement

Media rich expert analysis

Socially powered expert analysis

Insurance

Macro trends in insurance

Consultative approach

Risk increasing due to global

change

Technology

Brokers

1

• Lack of trust in insurers

• Apathy and lack of interest

• Lack of understanding of what you get for their money

How can digital change perceptions of insurance?

Challenges facing your industry

2

• Digital experiences primarily look at price and purchase incentives

• This reinforces the perception that insurance is a price-driven commodity

• But what about improving the customer experience?

Buying insurance is decided on price, isn’t it?

Challenges facing your industry

3

• Great customer experience/advice

• Great UX – e.g. easy to fulfil online

How can you buck the disintermediation trend?

Challenges facing your industry

Insurance brokers must respond to these challenges

Insight led experiences

Contextual expertise

Fast speed of response

Facilitate risk through digital

From our review of the market the direction to market leading is clear:

Tactics

• More retail approach to IA and customer journeys

• Visual merchandising: the placement of CTAs/products on customer journeys that are organised by need

• Personalisation and visitor self-selection

• Shorter, features and benefits led content

• Mobile-first design

• More helpful and supportive of customers

Success measures

• Increase in applications and completions

• Increase in proportion of digital interactions

• More return visitors browsing more services for longer

• More recommendations

• Increase in products held by each customer

Strategic approach

• Differentiated experience from your peers

• Customer not inwardly focused

• Simpler to consume (across purchase/renewal, advice and inspiration journeys)

• Ability to measure, test and learn

Achi

eved

by

In o

rder

to

A game-changing digital strategy

1

• Power shifting to standardised risk

• New business opportunities in emerging risks e.g. nanotechnology

• Niche market opportunities now accessible through digital, new sectors and geographies

Customer revolution

How are brokers responding to this?

2

• Investing in digital for competitive advantage

• Dealing with the ‘Black Swan’ problem of emerging risks, particularly technological

• Managing and tracking risk change

Demands for profitability

How are brokers responding to this?

3

• New markets, new products

• Technology and analytics to create insights, data led decision

Information

How are brokers responding to this?

What do risk facilitation leaders look like?

Needs-based approach

Using digital to support both cost efficiency and a more consultative approach, simultaneously

Content leaders

Expand information gathering to better anticipate risk, and through content pass this expertise on to the client

Data experts

Improve their ability to collect, integrate, analyse and communicate data into actionable insights

What could this mean for consumer needs?

Ecotricity use customer data to promote the use of green energy

Hive combines gas-use tracking hardware and cloud-based account management to give more control over home heating

MyVirgin media uses customer analysis to recommend products, whose delivery can be tracked from within the platform

Lending

There’s already familiarity with the digital payday loan model

This model is being rolled out to business lending • Everline allows small and medium

sized businesses to borrow up to £120,000 for up to 24 months

• Up to date business data and innovative technology supports responsible, real time, automated risk decisions

• 10 minute application process. Funds in 5 minutes

• Over 6,000 business loans and lending +£60m to small businesses

Amazon lending – business lending for resellers • The interest rate for all sellers is

5.9%, with a 1% arrangement fee. Less than funding circle

• Borrowers must pay Amazon back within four to six months

• Apply from within your Amazon merchant account

• Buyer ratings and performance count used as part of acceptance criteria

• Money within five business days

• Already in US and now UK and China

Bank and peer to peer lending partnerships

Creating the business case

• Targeted • Lifestyle approach • Great case studies

Platform Black: a new working capital model “Pay-as-you-go working capital”

innovates the traditional invoice factoring model by allowing clients to auction outstanding payments to institutions and private investors.

• Access to a much larger pool of potential buyers

• Using digital to deliver services at very low costs

• Cash into the client’s account within ten days of the auction closing

Content Strategy

Know your audiences

What you want to communicate

What your audience is

interested in

Successful content

The content sweet-spot is about meeting the goals of your business and the needs of your customers

Case study: ING.world• Story-led approach from a digital

quarterly magazine

• Gives analysis and insight on the world of business and finance

• Interviews, articles, customer stories and opinion pieces - each edition explores a single theme from a variety of angles

• Release coincides with ING's results days

• 35,000 unique visitors per issue

• Won a Digital Communication award for being Europe’s best branded web magazine

Case study:The Financialist • Credit Suisse thinking relevant to

the lives and conversations of a sophisticated UHNW audience

• Global trends and the art of living, future-oriented

• Informed but offbeat take on things. Not the conventional wisdom

• Longer format articles and daily spark blog

• Articles organised by interest

• Promoted through Twitter and LinkedIn

• 70-100 likes for some articles and many shares

1. Content quality

Move from reference resource to ‘browsable’ content

Reference resource ‘Browsable’ content Tactic for ‘browsable’

Feels like… A journal A magazine Pull quotes, strong imagery, journalistic tone

Publishing frequency Quarterly New content weekly or more Editorial calendar

User mindset Researching specific topics – search and filter vital

‘Flicking through’ for any interesting articles Promote related content

Shelf life Longer Shorter Publish short pieces frequently

Length Long form, in depth Snackable’ Vairety of formats – articles, blogs, videos, infographics

Looking for… Facts, figures, date and examples

Insight, comment, latest trends

Tag and categorise by theme/trend

Importance Source credibility vital Author credibility important Showcase author knowledge and expertise

Give users valuable, online-only content

• This will increase interactions

• Consider online versions of annual reports – they go above and beyond the usefulness of the hard copy documents by giving video content/interactive charts etc.

TUI Travel plc online Annual Report

Keep long form content, but add a shorter version

• Traditional FS content is very long form and feels like a report

• Sites need more ‘browsable’ content too, so that the needs of all audience types are met

Example: JSTOR Daily

• Short articles inspired by the journal findings

• Each article contains links to the to the relevant journals

• JSTOR daily receives 150,000 page views a month

JSTOR

Make your content work online

Web-content should be:

• Concise – people don’t ‘read’ online, they scan

• ‘Chunked’ using bullets and subheadings

• Simple sentence structure and clear language

• Linked to and from – unlike print

• Findable – site structure should be intuitive

• Accessible – PDFs should be avoided where possible

Clear ‘share’ buttonSubheads add structure and make scanning easier

Graphs visually illustrate data

Links allow users to find out more

Blog post from econsultancy

‘Heroise’ authors

Thought leadership content relies on author credibility. Use bio pages to prove author expertise, raise their profiles, and enable users to see all articles they have written:

• Image & Bio

• Twitter handles & LinkedIn info

• Links to all author articles

JP Morgan

Create a community

Simple ways to drive interaction include:

• Comment and feedback functionalities

• Ability for people to get in touch with authors (LinkedIn)

Economist

2. Content visibility

Help users discover content that is of value to them

• Through easy-to-navigate search

• Through curation and recommendation

• By helping users stay on top of latest trends and thinking

• By helping with a paper or presentation

• By supporting decision-making

• By making the user part of a community of thinkers

• By making it relevant

• By introducing personalised content

• Through tailored experiences

Tagging

• ‘Reference resource’ users need to be able to find content that they’re looking for quickly

• Browsing users need to be signposted to related content that they may find interesting

Clickable, visible tags aggregate content on a theme

Tags also power related content

The Guardian article page

Introduce searching and filtering

• Users looking for content on a specific topic will search

• A good search tool will enable them to refine the results based on content type, publication date etc.

Clickable, visible tags aggregate content on a theme

Econsultancy search results page

Give users a clear next step

Online content should always prompt users into action – this could be reading another article, getting touch, or signing up for an event

Prompting action

Prompting action

Deloitte

Encourage promoting and sharing

• Readership will grow organically if content is useful and sharing is made easy

• Professional audiences do share – especially on Twitter and LinkedIn

• Promote articles across your own social media accounts too, using relevant hashtags

Rbs.com – corporate content, often shared

Show users content that is relevant to them

• Basic personalisation – uses tagging to surface content of a similar type (you may also like…), or uses preferences that users have previously given in a login area

• Advanced personalisation – rules based personalisation displays relevant content based on previous browsing behaviour, search terms

Econsultancy – recommended content

Proactively alert readers to new content

• Allow users to register to receive alerts for new content on topics that interest them most

• Tag content as you upload it, and these emails will be automatically generated

• Measuring click-throughs will also give insight into which content is working, and which isn’t

Henderson Asset Managers: Preference centre

’Drip feed’ content to keep visitors coming back

Journal content released quarterly/

monthly/weekly

Continuous release of additional shorter pieces in a

variety of formats: blogs, interviews, videos, lists etc.

Journal content released quarterly/

monthly/weekly

Continuous release of additional shorter pieces in a

variety of formats: blogs, interviews, videos, lists etc.

Journal content released quarterly/

monthly/weekly

Test and learn to create better content over time

Measure impact

Learn and adapt

Publish

• What worked?

• What didn’t?

• A/B test

• Experiment with content formats

• Number of views

• Dwell time

• Bounce rate

• Shares

Consider best format for message + audience

You need to know what users like, and which articles are popular

Michael Walker, Senior Business Development Manager, ORM michael.walker@ormlondon.com

ormlondon.com@ormlondon

Thank you