Five years from now the UK Pensions and Investment industry will have transformed. The primary reason is the changing dynamics in investor behaviour that are influencing the way they interact across multi-channels to make more informed investment decisions. In particular, the over fifties segment, referred to as grey-power, whose ranks are being joined by millions of baby boomers are demanding greater say over their future destiny. Their demand for more transparency and control over their financial destiny is a powerful force that could stimulate deep rooted and dramatic change that goes beyond the investment industry.

Companies from other sectors, in particular retailers, have amassed considerable lifestyle data and have been pioneering more sophisticated self-service experiences and insights; inevitably this includes the grey-power sector. The combination of this shift towards empowering the customer and the increasingly crowded competitive marketplace is likely to lead to a significant change and more intense focus around winning a greater share of the ‘investor’s wallet’.

Insightful lessons can be taken from other market sectors that have recently been transformed by customer behaviour, where those organisations that set new market standards for delivering service experiences are favoured above the competition (Apple, for example). The speed of these changes happened far faster than many expected, especially the conservative incumbents who have now been displaced as market leaders.

The combination of these market shifting changes, when considered from a wider and deeper perspective, do demand attention sooner rather than later. This creates the impetus for a number of initiatives:

 Proactively targeting the grey-power market segment as a sustainable growth opportunity

 Redesigning and retooling the retail distribution channel including the associated processes and services

 Developing competitive advantage from improved and enriched interactions and experiences

 Increasing the volume of customer self-service using insights and knowledge as competitive differentiators

 Building a product innovation and development process that starts with the customer not the manufacturer

 Establishing a services platform for delivering superior multi-channel, consistent and transparent experiences.

Customers are changing the way they research and buy products from the UK Pensions and Investment industry. Corporations must learn to influence the behaviours of both the mass affluent and mass market by managing the customer’s experience around their need for knowledge, insights and tacit interactions at key, and appropriate, stages of their decision-making process. Leadership of this en masse transition will trigger a customer-centric paradigm shift that will profoundly change the UK Pensions and Investment industry.