Developing Centres of Competencies

Getting products and services to eMarketplaces is only half the challenge for financial services firms. Fulfilling the customer’s needs is the lion’s share of the activity. The essence of customer service is harnessing resources, outsourcing or partnering to deliver on the associated activities surrounding transactions such as origination, brokering, passing, aggregating, consolidating, managing and providing interchange between partners, competitors, merchants and customers. The agility and efficiency of these services and transactions are a direct reflection on the performance of the firm. Organizational competency is a combination of employee know-how and a robust technological infrastructure, as discussed in Chapter 2. Core competencies are almost impossible to define if the product and its value proposition are not clear and if the underlying business process is not designed with graduated process measurements. In summary, typical core competencies to support new financial services offerings fall into several categories: Sensing the market and customer trends Establishing a feedback loop Establishing a fast market reaction Managing customer relationships Managing partner relationships Managing technological context.