How Executives At Financial Services Firms Can Get More From The eBusiness Solutions Market

eBusiness executives at financial services providers have many roles, and one of the more critical is choosing technology solutions that meet their firm's technology-agnostic business problems. Financial services companies have specific client relationship needs and unique legal and compliance requirements, yet the existing process for selecting technology solutions suffers from the same difficulties found in other industries: an approach driven by requests for proposals (RFPs) that fail to clearly identify and articulate the key objectives, dilute the business needs by casting too wide a net, and too often miss the needs of providers and their clients. Forrester endeavored to develop a better line of attack for getting the most from the solutions market. What came about is a scenario-based technology evaluation process — what we call the STEP methodology — which involves three stages: preparation, evaluation, and decision. To illustrate the usefulness of this new approach, we have outlined how an eBusiness executive at a financial services provider might use this methodology to select a mobile banking solution for the provider's retail banking customers.