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Parallels With Media

Media platforms faced disruption ever since creating webpages became as easy as sending emails. Ten years ago, finews.ch founders in Switzerland have identified the trend of digitalisation and decided to focus on being a pure digital platform carrying the finest news on Swiss banking, asset management, and Swiss financial technologies. They did not straddle between print and online, like many others did.

The strategy to focus only to run online news has served the lean organisation well through the decade, as it focused resources on the most important aspects – journalists and a friendly user-interface, instead of costly print runs. 

When Faced With Disruption

On the contrary, we observed that many other media platforms who straddled both print and online struggled with resources. To ride the digital wave, media operators forced journalists to write print, shoot videos, and edit within very tight deadlines. Then, they watched in horror as audiences complain about fading quality. 

When audiences get turned away, the publications' reach and influence dissipated, ultimately resulting in the death of their media.

Over the last decade, the pace of disruption in the media industry obliterated many traditional players, especially mainstream ones, as smartphone makers push out increasingly advanced offerings at lower prices and social media platforms commoditised printed news. In the meantime, niche media publications sprung up and flourished. 

Re-Thinking the Strategy

In a similar light, banks should also re-think their strategy for the next five years. Do they want to be the best bank serving the masses, the mass affluent, or the high-net-worth? Or perhaps, they should focus on serving corporates?

Each segment of customer has different needs, different expectations, and come with different regulatory requirements. Banks that thrive can balance both the needs and expectations. Customers of tomorrow continue to need the same things as their parents did – a safe and secure place to put their deposits, guard their privacy, and provide financing solutions that match their circumstances. 

However, their expectations are vastly different from the previous generation: timely responses from their banks, financial institutions that act in a sustainable manner, respect them as customers rather than with impunity, even though they are not classified in the high-net-worth segment. 

Secret to Longevity?

In our article The Private Banks That Disappeared in 2018, we talked about how one third of all players in Swiss private banking have disappeared over the last five years. 

Perhaps, we can learn from one of Switzerland’s oldest bank – Lombard Odier, which has survived 40 financial crisis. In its Christmas card recycled with paper and green tea: it has a message for us «to rethink sustainability, rethink investment, rethink everything». 

«It’s this ability and desire to constantly rethink that buys stability,» says the bank. Perhaps, banks should start to choose their customers, or their customers will choose the more responsive Google Bank or WeChat Pay to do their banking.