"There is a strategy here that advisers, indeed all financial services’ firms, can follow in order to generate brand awareness and to drive consumers/clients to their business."
Not since the days of, ‘Tony Hadley rejected as new face of Midland Bank’ – I’ve made that up by the way – have we seen the culture clash that is popular music/retail banking collide in such a spectacular way.
Regardless of what the Black Eyed Peas front man will be doing for the digital bank, you would be hard-pressed to deny that it’s something of a PR coup for the proposition – Mr i.am is also investing in Atom – and perhaps outlines how a relatively new operation can go about making waves by adopting a ‘mash-up’ of the traditional and the technological.
Clearly, Atom Bank have a significant PR and marketing budget in order to support such activities, but to my mind there is a strategy here that advisers, indeed all financial services’ firms, can follow in order to generate brand awareness and to drive consumers/clients to their business.
At the heart of it, is the over-riding focus on technology, and clearly setting yourself up as a new breed of digital bank driven by the hardware that consumers now use every single second of every single day is obvious. This, in the UK at least, is all about the ‘mobile’ and the UK consumer’s want and need to access all parts of their financial life through their phone.
Now, for mortgage advisers, there may be a slight disconnect here in their ability to develop such an all-encompassing mobile proposition however this doesn’t mean that simple apps or client-facing website areas can’t be developed, perhaps in order to keep in contact with clients or to allow them to track where their cases might be. Indeed, we have – as part of our own Revolution system – a client website function that provides them with access to their product details and tracking via a personalised PIN number.
So, these systems already exist and may not require significant investment however you might want to go further in your ability to engage with clients. When you have a growing potential client base that is much more inclined to use their phones for updates, indeed they even expect this, then perhaps it might be worth taking the plunge to at least get yourself on the starting grid.
As mentioned, opening up parts of your own system so that it can be seen by your clients appears eminently do-able and could perhaps be marketed as a clear benefit and differential from your competitors. Calendar updates and ongoing communication about products and services can then be developed to run alongside a client’s special deal and can be a regular reminder of what you can offer and where your client’s currently sit in terms of their existing mortgage and perhaps any other needs they might have.
Overall, no-one is expecting you to add Tinie Tempah or Stormzy to your Board of Directors, or to employ Harry Styles as your next Office Manager, but this is more about understanding how all clients are now running their lives. It’s not even a ‘younger generation’ thing that ‘grown-ups’ are completely ill-equipped to deal with – think of your own use of tech and what you want from the product and service providers you deal with, and from that you should be able to extrapolate how your digital offering might work.
No-one is suggesting that you do away with the traditional procedures and processes that have worked for you – indeed, you only need to look at Atom Bank’s recent price-cutting on its five-year products to see how it is quite willing to use ‘older’ methods in order to generate interest and business – but marrying up with newer communication methods and developing the technology footprint of your business can open up your offering to different parts of the market whilst catering for the changing needs of your existing clientele.
