Ovum: Ovum sees tablets impacting wealth management and corporate banking sectors in a big way May 2, 2012 – Rik Turner
Organisations in the wealth management and corporate banking sectors have yet
to realise the potential for easy and enjoyable content consumption
represented by tablets, according to Ovum. A tablet’s slick,
gesture-driven user interface and shareable screen is ideal for helping
customer meetings run more smoothly and effectively.
In a new report*, the independent technology analysts look at support for
tablet devices in corporate banking, to accommodate treasurers’ needs
when they are out of the office, and in wealth management, as an aid to
customer interaction in face-to-face meetings.
“The financial sector as a whole has come out of the global crisis with
an urgent need to rebuild its credibility with a disillusioned public,”
says Rik Turner, senior analyst at Ovum and author of the report. “In
certain sub-verticals such as wealth management more “face-time”
with the customer can help this rebuilding process.”
Furthermore, as most divide their assets up to be managed by different wealth
management providers, a well-executed meeting carried out with the aid of a
tablet may attract further business away from a competitor.
In extending their platforms’ functionality to tablets, Ovum finds that
most of the independent software vendors (ISVs) that address these financial
market segments currently prefer the downloadable to the browser-based
app. This may be changing, however, as significant improvements are
taking place in the technologies that enable the latter.
“HTML5 is becoming more robust and will gain momentum through
2012,” says Turner. “Features such as the ability to work
offline, access on-device contact lists, and so on, are in development and
although there is still a significant drawback to be addressed in the form of
code security, this too may not be an insurmountable obstacle.”
With these improvements combined with the downloadable apps’ immense
shortcoming – a different version must be written for each operating
system the developer wants them to run on – Ovum expects to see more
companies looking at browser-based functionality a year from now.
