Who "owns" the customer? - changing environment of the financial services industry - Panel Discussion

Chief Executive, The, Sept, 1999 by J.P. Donlon

Buoncore: That's not been my experience.

Benmosche: People with money - and I'm talking more from the brokerage side now; that's where there are far more affluent customers - we find that they are willing to share a lot of things with a trusted advisor. Even personal things. In the brokerage business, they will tell you a lot about their money, but they don't like to tell very many people about it. On the insurance side, I'm stunned by the amount of personal stories we learn about the lives of the families, the problems with children, drug problems, because they trust the insurance person.

Toal: And that's the point, the important word - it's that trusted advisor. We have to figure out how to become trusted advisors.

Pollard: The Net is more impersonal. Is there a trust, privacy, and security issue for significant segments of the marketplace with regard to the Net?

Spooner: The government doesn't think so.

But regardless of the influence regulation is going to have on privacy and how it's implemented on-line, you still have the kind of virtualization of a one-to-one relationship between you and the consumer. And so if you let them have control over exactly what information they're providing and ask them, "Is it okay if I do this with this? If I can provide you some value-added information using this information you just gave me that might help you buy things more productively, do you want me to do that?" And we've found consumers almost always say yes.

Donlon: Is there a flip side of techno-ecstasy? Will we reach a point where it becomes techno-depression?

Spooner: If you just talk about Internet banking specifically in the retail space, there is a level of entertainment value that is experienced initially. And so we ramp programs initially with extra bandwidth and extra hardware just to support that. But that goes into a trough relatively soon after and then you have to bring more value. Because it fundamentally is not that interesting to be able to see if that check cleared or if you paid that utility bill, although it is a little entertaining at first.

Hamilton: If there's a reason you have to provide information because you get something of value back and you can trust how that information's going to be used, then you're going to provide it on a one-to-one basis. That's exactly why that works with personal advisors and agents.

I think that in order not to have real regulation problems, we have to be judicious about the way that we who have information use it. And if we use it with the customer in mind and continue to maintain that trust, then we can avoid a lot of problems. If we don't, we've got real issues. We won't really be able to serve our customers with the information that we could gather.

Look at Europe. Europe is already trying to influence what our customer privacy regulation is here, because they have more stringent regulations. We just don't want to get to that point.

David Daberko (National City): I've become convinced, and even more convinced after listening to all of you today, that the person who owns the customer is the person who has the best help desk.