People’s desire for personal interaction with a bank clerk still proves to be strong. Financial advisors offering advice that is specific to the customer’s situation will help re-establish the faith people have in banks.

These are the conclusions of a survey performed by Deloitte, the globally operating service provider for accountants, tax advisors, consultants and financial planners.

According to Deloitte, an improvement in cross selling – an important source of profit in a satiated market – will lead to an improvement in trust.

Turn to a branch office
In their survey, Deloitte polled 770 clients of various Dutch banks. The results: over 90% of the customers use the Internet to gather information, but about 70% still turn to a branch office to actually purchase complex financial products. Good advice is still valued,with 15% of the participants indicating that they would be willing to pay for personal financial advice.

It seems that banks have a lot of work to do in this area: as much as 65% of the participants were not satisfied with the advice their bank was giving them. Especially quality and timeliness was evaluated as below par, as well as reachability, credibility and awareness of the client’s situation.

Training
Over half the clients felt that the banks put their own interests before that of their clients. 80% of the participants felt that their banks were not aware of their particular situation.

“Banks should focus on customer centric processes that go beyond the established channels, and on training their account managers. With a relatively small investment, the large investments in IT of the past years can be made worthwhile,” says Emeric van Woes, who authored the research paper together with Hans Honing.

Disruptive Banking wrote about these issues before and drew similar conclusions.

What do you think? Can an investment in personal contact and tailor made advice salvage the reputation of banks? Let us know.