Ovum sees tablets impacting wealth management and corporate banking sectors in a big way

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: Organisations in the wealth management and corporate banking sectors have yet to realise the potential for easy and enjoyable content consumption represented by tablets, according to Ovum. A tablet’s slick, gesture-driven user interface and shareable screen is ideal for helping customer meetings run more smoothly and effectively.

In a new report, the independent technology analysts look at support for tablet devices in corporate banking, to accommodate treasurers' needs when they are out of the office, and in wealth management, as an aid to customer interaction in face-to-face meetings.

“The financial sector as a whole has come out of the global crisis with an urgent need to rebuild its credibility with a disillusioned public,” says Rik Turner, senior analyst at Ovum and author of the report. “In certain sub-verticals such as wealth management more "face-time" with the customer can help this rebuilding process.”

Furthermore, as most divide their assets up to be managed by different wealth management providers, a well-executed meeting carried out with the aid of a tablet may attract further business away from a competitor.

In extending their platforms' functionality to tablets, Ovum finds that most of the independent software vendors (ISVs) that address these financial market segments currently prefer the downloadable to the browser-based app. This may be changing, however, as significant improvements are taking place in the technologies that enable the latter.

“HTML5 is becoming more robust and will gain momentum through 2012,” says Turner. “Features such as the ability to work offline, access on-device contact lists, and so on, are in development and although there is still a significant drawback to be addressed in the form of code security, this too may not be an insurmountable obstacle.”

With these improvements combined with the downloadable apps’ immense shortcoming – a different version must be written for each operating system the developer wants them to run on – Ovum expects to see more companies looking at browser-based functionality a year from now.