Transformation towards Customer-Oriented Service Architectures in the Financial Industry

The financial industry is in midst of a global transformation. Drivers for this are changes in customer behaviour, disruptive power of information technology and changes in the industry structure itself. These developments have the potential to shift the financial industry towards a customer-oriented financial market infrastructure and force banks to become more customer-oriented. The research presented here applies an integrated approach on service-oriented architectures (SOA) which combines a business and technological view on services and thus contributes to the emerging field of service science. The paper develops a customer-oriented service architecture model for banks and analyzes the impact of future banking sales and distribution by a quantitative survey. Data was collected from 25 banks in the German-speaking area. The empirical results of hypotheses testing indicate that banks have only started to restructure their existing architectures, but will not be customer-oriented in 2015. However, first tendencies show that banks concentrate on the extension of core competencies in echannels to better and more cost efficiently serve their customers. Nevertheless, the developments planned until 2015 neglect necessary enhancements of banks` service architectures such as the integration of value added services from external service providers or the centralization of processes in all customer-facing services.