LONDON, September 30 /PRNewswire/ --

- New Study Reveals That Consumers are Leading the Digital Revolution!

There is a rapidly increasing awareness that the digital revolution is
fully underway. The challenge given by Martha Lane Fox (the UK Government's
Digital Champion) to "get as many of the 17 million currently without access
to the net online by the time of the Olympics in 2012", and the recent report
'Digital Britain' from Lord Carter, confirms that serious political attention
is now being paid to the digitalisation of households throughout the UK.

There have been winners and losers even in these early days of what's now
being called the 'Digital Economy'. The Revolution in Self-Service Channels
in the Financial Services Sector report 
(http://selfservicereport.businessdecision.co.uk/) analyses the growth of
consumer self-service channels in key areas of the Financial Services market
and looks at who is winning and who could lose out. This new report examines
the recent emergence of new operating models and highlights the
transformation of more established business models in those parts of the
Financial Markets most affected (e.g. general insurance, wealth management
and retail banking). The report investigates the drivers and inhibitors of
the market, the broad demographic spread of demand and the challenges to
established players in financial services and assesses the impact of future
changes that may occur in this emerging digital marketplace.

Consumerisation of IT

Consumers are now armed with new and established technologies; they are
testing the very capability of many 'traditional' businesses to communicate
digitally, whether they are at work, at home, abroad or just travelling.
Businesses that lack the means to connect digitally with consumers, those
with aged business operating models that seek to 'box' the consumer into an
'arthritic' framework and those unable to provide products and services that
use ubiquitous and supportive technologies will find themselves left behind
by this burgeoning consumer demand for digitally-based products and services.

"Digitalisation is gathering pace and is likely to sweep aside any
organisation that cannot respond to this digital 'tsunami," warns Ian
Marshall co-author of the report, Business & Decision.

These are some of the findings from the new report 'The Revolution in
Self-Service Channels in the Financial Services Sector' published by Business
& Decision (http://www.businessdecision.co.uk/), an international consultancy
and systems integrator and the Industrial Statistics Research Unit at
Newcastle University.

Intelligent Digital Connectivity

As users begin to root themselves in web-based consumerism, so the
pressure grows on businesses to deliver sites that meet their needs in terms
of design, colouration, ease of navigation and content management.

Of course, even if a business is digitally savvy and is able to hold onto
the consumer for longer than 8 seconds (the maximum time window that an
organisation has to convince a consumer to stay on site), gaining the
confidence of consumers is paramount to achieving a level of sustainability
to success. An organisation must be able to create 'intelligent' digital
connectivity between itself and the consumer. This can be achieved through
developing an understanding of the consumer (almost a tacit awareness of
consumer behaviour) by creating and retaining 'memories' of previous
transactions, queries and connections, and combining this with non-intrusive
profiling.

".. Increased availability of powerful, accessible visual data mining
tools has democratised the exploration of consumer behaviour. There is now no
excuse for any business to ignore the messages that can be readily extracted
from the information soup surrounding them..." says Shirley Coleman
co-author, Industrial Statistics Research Unit.

Those businesses unable to profit from this digital connectivity will
undoubtedly see market share declining, either to new market entrants,
innovative businesses or those with transformed business models all of which
are able to intelligently connect with the consumer.

Demographics and Digitalisation

The demographic spread of demand for digital connectivity involves all
age groups, with a distinct correlation between age groups and various waves
of social networking media. For example, research published by comScore
(global source of digital market intelligence) reveals that in the Facebook
world, there are 260 million users, of whom 52% are over the age of 35, 12%
over 55. Meanwhile, in the land of Twitter the majority of the 40 million
users are over 35 years old (with 20% of them aged over 55).

The demographic spread, with older groupings of the population readily
visible in the use of Social Networking sites, suggests that the digital
revolution is well underway.

Dis-intermediation and Re-intermediation

For some of the Financial Services sector areas, such as General
Insurance (GI), there are seismic changes being experienced as the
traditional direct connection between consumer and the provider of GI
products (e.g. motor, home, travel insurance cover) becomes fractured. This
connection between Insurance supplier and consumer is being heavily disrupted
by 'Product Aggregators' such as Moneysupermarket.com, Confused.com, etc.

When these aggregators first appeared they were essentially providing
comparison product/price search capabilities, but now a number of them are
expanding their services and are found to be 're-intermediating' themselves
between consumer and product provider, offering a comprehensive product
purchase proposition. Within the GI space, this re-intermediation comes only
a few years after a number of major GI insurers dis-intermediated their tied
High Street brokers from the marketplace and established a direct connection
between themselves and the consumer.

Who's in Charge?

Thus, for many large organisations there are many challenges. For some,
there remains confusion as to which business function within the organisation
is responsible for driving it towards implementing a self-service strategy -
namely, who articulates it, who is accountable and who delivers it? For
others there is a suggestion that to meet the demand of the consumer digital
world, they have to create a 'green field' entry point outside of their large
and unwieldy business models in order to access this digital consumer world
and deliver the services and products that such a world expects. And finally,
in those parts of the sector where consumer choice remains restricted, there
are organisations that believe the consumer can still be 'boxed' in by
forcing the consumer to use aged and arthritic business operating models.

Who survives?

Only time will tell how many of our existing large and well-known
business brands will exist in 10 or 20 years time when the digital revolution
is past and digitalisation is an everyday feature of our lives. What has been
shown is that through all major industrial changes, businesses that are
adaptable and responsive, that rise to meet the challenges and understand the
fundamental shifts taking place, can and do survive albeit sometimes in a
very different form. For those unable to do that, the industrial wastelands
in Britain are visible examples of what can happen.

A copy of this research report entitled, 'The Revolution in Self-Service
Channels in the Financial Services Sector', with full details of the findings
and conclusions can be requested from
http://selfservicereport.businessdecision.co.uk/.

About Business & Decision

Business & Decision is an international Consulting and Systems
Integration (CSI) company. It is a leader in Business Intelligence (BI) and
Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and a major player in e-Business,
Enterprise Information Management (EIM), Enterprise Solutions as well as
Management Consulting. Business & Decision contributes to the success of
customer projects by driving maximum business performance. The company has a
reputation for functional and technological expertise and has forged
partnerships with all of the key technology vendors.

Located in 19 countries, Business & Decision currently employs more than
2700 people worldwide.

Additional information is available at http://www.businessdecision.com.

A copy of the report is available on request.

About Newcastle University's Industrial Statistics Research Unit

Newcastle University's Industrial Statistics Research Unit (ISRU) has
been delivering consulting, learning programmes, coaching, and research
services since 1984. ISRU offer a diverse range of skills bridging the gap
between applied target driven performance and sound academic practice. Many
well-known financial, service, manufacturing and healthcare organisations
have improved business performance through applying ISRU services. The
methods that ISRU employ and embed in organisations are aimed at improving
services, processes and products; in terms of efficiency, quality, speed,
cost and complexity.

For further details please contact +44(0)191-222-5750 or
isruenquiries@ncl.ac.uk

Also, please see ISRU's website at http://www.isru.ncl.ac.uk