Consumer trust in large financial institutions is slipping away, says CoreData Group’s founder and CEO Andrew Inwood.
Speaking at the 2023 MDRT Annual Meeting in Nashville, North America, Sydney-based Inwood told an international audience of industry professionals that “…largest doesn’t mean ‘most trusted’.”
Based on research carried out by his firm, Inwood says: “Trust scores in the biggest funds are collapsing in Australia because they can’t deliver the outcomes that people want.
“People do not want the cheapest price for everything. They want service. That means the power is shifting from the big aggregators to the people who can deliver service to them.
…It is trust that will drive the economy forward…
“Service is becoming the biggest driver for satisfaction. It is trust that will drive the economy forward in the future.”
Inwood says advisers can’t control the market, other people’s actions, or the government. But maintains they can control service levels, the client relationship, and the experience clients move through.
“And those will build trust faster than anything else.”
He says discounting goods and services is not the route to prosperity.
“Credit Suisse is the most recent example of this,” he says. “They’ve gone. They tried to be the cheapest in the market and it just didn’t work out.”
UBS has acquired Credit Suisse creating a new consolidated banking group.
Inwood says: “UBS focused at the other end, on service, engagement, and experience. It’s harder, stickier, and it scales much more fundamentally.”
He says the world is changing and moving quickly to a different model of doing business, adding that businesses need to:
- Be based on service, rather than engagement
- Quickly move to relationship
- Be in control of the experience
Turning to advisers, Inwood says the hard work has to be done by them. And that to succeed will require benevolence, competence, integrity, and predictability.
“The more lives you can transform, the better off we are all going to be,” he says.
