Designing for Cost Transparency in Investment Advisory Service Encounters

Investment advisory services of financial service providers (FSPs) exhibit several characteristics that are detrimental to advisory quality. The interaction of advisor and client is strained by a lack of transparency regarding the advisory process (what activities are performed and why) and the information used therein (what information is used for what purpose and with what effect), as well as regarding the precise costs of the service and the recommended products. In prior research, we suggested that process and information transparency issues may be appropriately addressed with collaborative information technology (IT) artifacts. In this paper, we argue that collaborative, transparent artifacts may also be a premise of enabling cost transparency. To this end, we describe a complete research cycle of designing, implementing, and evaluating a shared cost-transparent IT artifact to support client-advisor interaction in investment advisory encounters. Evaluation results suggest the efficacy of our design in improving the clients' perceived cost transparency as well as increase their satisfaction and their willingness to pay for the received investment advice. These findings may also challenge the common belief of FSPs that transparent, fee-based advisory services would neither be accepted by clients nor be economically viable. Practical implications of these findings for designing advisory encounters with supportive IT are discusse

What you see is what you (can) get? Designing for process transparency in financial advisory encounters

In this paper, we report on a study to establish process transparency in service encounters of financial advisors and their clients. To support their interaction, we implemented a cooperative software system for tabletops, building on transparency patterns suggested by the literature. In evaluations, however, we found that our design did not improve the perceived transparency and comprehensibility. Introducing the IT artifact into advisory failed to enhance the client?s overall experience and even seemed to negatively influence the client?s perception of the advisory process. Using the representational guidance of depicting the process and its activities as a navigable, interactive map made clients believe that interactions with their advisor were restricted to the system?s functionality, thus expecting that what they see is all they can get

Impacts of CIT: the opportunistic user

Applications that have been a huge success in private collaboration - such as video conferencing, application sharing or social tagging systems -, have been failures in business collaboration. The benefits of Collaborative Information Technology (CIT) have been discussed in research and acknowledged by many companies for quite some time. However, the usage of such technology in business context is still surprisingly low. Explanations have been sought through the investigation of CIT in various settings. These studies have been mostly conducted in the specific context of a single CIT tool and/or task, whereas in some businesses several CIT tools are used concurrently when attempting to achieve a certain goal. In this paper we aim for a more holistic view of CIT usage by relating task, CIT functionality and its impacts. We followed a qualitative approach and conducted 10 semi-structured interviews with team leaders of collocated teams in 10 different companies. Our preliminary results show that this approach has promise to further explain the usage of CIT tools and that CITs are used opportunistically. The employee seems to rather use a few established functionalities for different tasks than substituting functionalities and therefore changing her habit, even though new functionalities might better suit a task at hand

Information Search Behavior of Investors and the Role of Advisory Services

Research into customer satisfaction of advisory services provided by financial service providers (FSPs) indicates a history of problems that originated well before the current financial crisis. As part of a research program into the design of advisory processes and supporting IT tools, we conducted a survey of affluent Swiss investors that was focused on their information search behavior when preparing to make an investment decision. Results show that advisory services are used at a later stage in the investment decision process, after Internet-based professional sources, media and personal contacts. In order for advisory services to become a preferred information source amongst customers, FSPs need to increase their accessibility, raise their level of perceived trust, and enhance the customer’s access to a diverse range of trusted information sources in the advisory process

Designing for cost transparency in investment advisory service encounters

Investment advisory services of financial service providers (FSPs) exhibit several characteristics that are detrimental to advisory quality. The interaction of advisor and client is strained by a lack of transparency regarding the advisory process (what activities are performed and why) and the information used therein (what information is used for what purpose and with what effect), as well as regarding the precise costs of the service and the recommended products. In prior research, we suggested that process and information transparency issues may be appropriately addressed with collaborative information technology (IT) artifacts. In this paper, we argue that collaborative, transparent artifacts may also be a premise of enabling cost transparency. To this end, we describe a complete research cycle of designing, implementing and evaluating a shared cost-transparent IT artifact to support client-advisor interaction in investment advisory encounters. Evaluation results suggest the efficacy of our design in improving the clients’ perceived cost transparency as well as increase their satisfaction and their willingness to pay for the received investment advice. These findings may also challenge the common belief of FSPs that transparent, fee-based advisory services would neither be accepted by clients nor be economically viable. Practical implications of these findings for designing advisory encounters with supportive IT are discussed