By Nigel Moulton, EMEA CTO at VCE

Technology market watchers call it the Platform Economy: the generation of companies including Airbnb, Uber and Amazon that first grip users with an excellent digital experience, provide them with a useful service or products and then sell more adjacent offerings to loyal customers. The question for all of us in financial services is how we build an equivalent brand that provides an open sesame to new revenue streams and a ‘stickiness’ that keeps customers coming back for more.

Building a superb digital user experience will be key. The website user interface, mobile app or other way into the brand must be engaging, highly usable, fast and consistent across services. And then of course the core selling proposition must have value in order for customers to trust one organisation to supply a range of services from banking to insurance to pensions.

By collecting and analysing data then, a financial services organisation will have a better chance to act as platform sellers.

But there is another, less well known ingredient to success in building a platform and that is managing the information held by the company. It has become a cliché to suggest that data is “the new oil” in the information age but it holds true in that when data is refined it can be used to generate enormous power. In the world of platforms, data can take on many guises and uses. We need to hold strong information about individual customers so that we can target our sales and marketing campaigns – and of course we have to ensure that we guard that information carefully and use it appropriately. But we also need to understand more about the larger universe so we know that when customers do x they will often go on to do y so long as z is offered. The IT industry has a term for this, Big Data, which refers to the ability to probe all sorts of information sources to spot correlations and understand customer sentiment and behaviour in the round, and then drill down to individuals and what they crave

So, to take a hypothetical example, a banking current account holder who has been well served for over 20 years and is a regular user of a smartphone app for personal banking might be interested in taking out a pension plan with the same lender so long as the offer is competitive and the digital experience is consistent with that provided by online banking. And the likelihood of that taking place will be increased if the customer has recently expressed satisfaction with customer service and receives an informative email offering a detailed explanation of the offer.

It’s no coincidence that many of the platform brands that are so admired today are young companies that have started out with the latest technology and are not hampered by their legacy.

By collecting and analysing data then, a financial services organisation will have a better chance to act as platform sellers - but then so can any other rival. So the key to competitive differentiation will partly lie in the systems that let data be captured and scrutinised. Unfortunately even many of the largest financial services organisations still labour on with old, outdated systems that make getting data in and out of systems and analysing that data a time-consuming and unwieldy business.

It’s no coincidence that many of the platform brands that are so admired today are young companies that have started out with the latest technology and are not hampered by their legacy. Any financial services organisation that has a serious interest in building a platform, rather than just a set of services that sit under an umbrella brand, needs to start thinking about modernising information systems... or risk missing their platform.