What We Did During Your Summer Vacation

In the past few weeks we've added two great analysts to the financial services team at Forrester.

Newly minted Associate Analyst Tom Watson debuts with "How Mass-Affluent Investors Use The Web," a look back across five years of research on households with $100K to $1 million of investable assets.

Today's mass-affluent investors are more risk-averse and less likely to trade online than they were five years ago. But they are more likely to visit their brokerage's Web site.

And here's the kicker: the wealthier the investor, the more important Web site quality is to his satisfaction with the brokerage as a whole (see the figure to the right).

Also, just out under Tom's name: "Getting Plan Participants To Take 401k Advice." Few US employees know their employer offers them 401k advice -- and half of them don't act on it. What's the solution? Different offerings for investors with different levels of self-directedness and call-center-based advisors who can complement online tools.

A Deeper Dive On Security

Principal Analyst Jonathan Penn joins the financial services team from our security research team. He'll continue to cover identity management and security, with a special emphasis on banks, brokerages, insurers, and other financial services firms.

Jonathan assists firms in a range of areas: directories, single sign-on, authentication, secure email, content security, and spam fighting. You may have seen his recent series on phishing: "Is Your Brand Phishing Bait?," and "Defending Against Phishing Attacks."

Next up from Jonathan: a look at US financial institutions' attitudes toward fraud and online customer authentication. If you're involved with online security decision-making, please take our 10-minute survey by clicking here. If you have a colleague who'd be a good respondent, forward this email to them. We'll make sure that everyone who completes the survey gets a copy of the report when it's published in September.

There's More To Come

To continue building our capacity, we're hiring more great analysts to look at the financial services industry. Do you know someone in the wealth management industry with direct experience in advisor-facing technologies? Or a technologist with expertise in core insurance systems like underwriting? Contact Jill Hamilton at jhamilton@forrester.com if you've got a candidate to suggest to us.


Bill Doyle
Financial Services Research Director

P.S. Don't miss your chance to vote for research you'd like to see written. Client Choice is a new feature on Forrester.com that enables clients to dictate some of the research that we write. Look for first-round Financial Services winner, "What Drives Bank Customers' Loyalty And Retention?" from Ron Shevlin in the next two weeks.

Research Referenced In This Issue Basel II's Impact Goes Beyond Risk Management (35141) Defending Against Phishing Attacks (34448) Finally, A Single EBPP Network For Canada (35150) Getting Plan Participants To Take 401(k) Advice (35116) How Mass-Affluent Investors Use The Web (34607) Insurance Uses Data Warehousing To Reduce Risk (35189) IRDs And Substitute Checks (35054) Is Your Brand Phishing Bait? (34447) PayPal Dominates The UK's New Payments Market (35077) Why Banks Can't Afford To Ignore Gen Yers (34617)

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