The Four M’s Reshaping Consumer Financial Services

Contributor:

Patrick Molineux
Chief Strategy Officer
Financial Services
CSC

In April 2011, we began on a journey to capture and publish our thoughts on the future of financial services. As we assessed the information, everything kept coming back to the consumer. And, more to the point, how the increasing connection of consumers using a bewildering array of devices is reshaping financial services.

I think most people in the financial services industry would accept that to some degree or another. But it took us a while to get our heads around a structure in which to understand this reshaping and explain what’s happening. I’m more than ever convinced it comes down to four “M’s.” Described in detail in our Connected Consumer report, they include:

• Mobile. More than 5 billion consumers now use mobile devices more often and in more sophisticated ways to undertake a greater variety of financial transactions. This is transforming payments, of course, but also insurance processes for claims, for example. But mobile is also about the mobile asset being insured – devices in cars, for example (a theme I’ll return to shortly).

• Micro. The biggest lesson I learned on this journey was the power of microfinance to change lives for the better (and sometimes for the worse). Micro is not where the money is in the future of financial services, at least not yet. But it is where technology and financial services are changing the lives of millions in a more powerful way than I originally understood.

• Media. Some 15 years ago, I first went onto the Internet. Now, the Web is where more and more financial services are done. I’m fascinated by the extent to which the Internet enables new financial models such as peer-to-peer lending, as well as peer-to-peer payments, which are already huge.

• Mining. My eyes have been opened during the past year to the sheer size and growth of unstructured data: 44 times more in 2020 than in 2009 some claim. The concept of “society mining” is one of the most powerful ideas to hit financial services, I think, possibly ever.

With that introduction, I’d like to welcome you to the Connected Consumer blog, and I hope you enjoy the report, which was produced through CSC’s Leading Edge Forum. I hate the term thought leadership (it has Orwellian overtones to me and, anyway, you likely know just as much as me if not more about this stuff), so take this as a viewpoint, a perspective, a challenge.

I look forward to reading your feedback and discussing this topic with you in the coming weeks and months as I’ll explore, with some of my colleagues, some of the new thinking that is emerging about the Connected Consumer.