Strategic Research Service

Consumer Financial Decisions (CFD) announces the Strategic Research Service (SRS), a new way to take advantage of its more than 30 years of knowledge, experience, insight, and data. The current economic situation has highlighted huge uncertainties that require financial institutions to make critical decisions about markets, customers, competition, regulation, and macroeconomic directions. At the same time, many institutions find that they cannot afford even to maintain their basic research functions, much less service and support these strategic needs. What you need is the SRS, a service from Strategic Business Insights—an organization with impeccable credentials, the ability to draw on the MacroMonitor, an unbiased and broad perspective, and a proven track record of successfully anticipating major trends, technology shifts, and psychological changes and their implications. The SRS seamlessly integrates these resources to your internal processes and is capable of meeting all your strategic needs on an on-call basis, whereby you pay for only the service that you use, when you use it.

The financial-services industry currently confronts at least seven major inflection points. Each of these points, on its own, would constitute the type of major shift that would necessitate recalibrating institutional goals and tactics. In combination, they mark an exponential increase in uncertainty. These points are not fads that will fade with the change in seasons, but major societal shifts that will restructure industries, turning winners into losers, and raise visionaries into Goliaths. Already, we have seen some of the pillars of the financial industry crumble, while major brands have been absorbed and others humbled into mere shells of their former selves. To survive—much less thrive—in this new world order, institutions need to be aware of and plan for these shifts and their implications. CFD has identified seven major shifts that affect financial institutions today:

• Bring Back Boring Banking
• The New World of Complete Convergence
• Saving-Investing-Speculating versus Borrowing
• Relationships, Accounts, and Product Consolidation
• Extended Adolescence and New Household Formation
• Conspicuous Consumption to Conspicuous Conservation
• Redefining Retirement: Revolving Retirement and Post Retirement Life Stages.

For each of these trends, Consumer Financial Decisions has 30 years of data that highlight the populations and enable those financial institutions that need to understand them better to interrogate, profile, and project the findings. In other words, with CFD's Strategic Research Service, hard data and our expertise can help you answer your strategic questions.

Get Answers to Your Strategic Questions

Some examples of the types of strategic questions that we can answer:

• How have recent changes affected your customers? What are customers thinking? What are they going to do? What's the impact on our products, distribution channels, marketing, and profits? What should we be monitoring now?
• What is the sustainable level of demand for each financial product? Which customers do you target for saving, borrowing, investing, and transaction products? What marketing messages will work now with your customers?
• Whether because of simplification, convenience, declining activity, or aging demographics, will we see significant consolidation or continued growth in financial services, products, markets, competitors, and relationships? How do you gather more of your customers' financial business?
• With all these huge changes occurring simultaneously, which are the fads that will fade and which are the trends that will endure and expand? What opportunities are best right now, versus three, five, or ten years from now?
• These changes of the past year reflect shifts in underlying psychological and sociological patterns. Financial firms need to understand and apply them in their product design, distribution, and marketing in order to be successful.
• The financial landscape is shifting. Where will new technologies such as peer-to-peer and virtual presences affect your customers? Which technologies do you need to support now? Which customers will use which technologies?
• For an entire generation of households, the prospect of retirement, which had been imminent, has completely changed. What is that generation going to do? What do you need to do to continue to meet its needs? What impact will this change have on the next generation's expectations for retirement?

Now is the time to take advantage of the Strategic Research Service to answer your institution's critical strategic questions about where to focus your limited resources and how. With CFD's Strategic Research Service you pay for only the strategy research you need, when you need it. Projects may be priced on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis for specific data needs or comprehensively on a fully facilitated solution process. (SRI created the Scenario Process for Strategic Planning in the 1970s and remains one of the world's leading practitioners today.)

Contact Us

Take the first step to gain the competitive advantage that comes from understanding the current economic situation and its implications. To discuss how CFD's Strategic Research Service can help, please contact us.