We are very excited to announce the hiring of our newest analyst in the eBusiness and Channel Strategy team – Tiffani Montez.

Tiffani joins Forrester from Wells Fargo where she spent 20 years managing various aspects of digital strategy, implementation, operations and cross-channel integration across lending, investments and customer service.  Tiffani joins a quickly expanding team which includes Peter Wannemacher, Bill Doyle, Ellen Carney and myself in North America dedicated to eBusiness and channel strategy for retail banking, lending, investments and insurance.

Tiffani’s will focus on digital financial service technologies including areas like mobile banking, personal financial management, online banking, person-to-person payments, automated account opening, etc. Tiffani will explore the vendor landscapes for these and other areas to help clients understand about how to make strategic vendor choices, implement new technologies, and create a operational team to manage the solutions once installed.

Additionally, Tiffani will expand on Forrester expertise in the lending area as well as cross-channel integration to drive sales and service strategies.

Tiffani can be found on twitter at @tiffanimontez

Brad

To this point, marketing and specifically interactive marketing have been the focus of social and its applicability to financial services. A colleague of mine – Nate Elliott – has written on the opportunities for the industry on a few occasions, and if you have not seen his work, please check it out.

The role of social outside of pure marketing has been less clear to this point, and it is only now that we can see the areas social can move the needle for financial services. Over the last year, Forrester has written numerous reports and case studies on the subject, and I wanted to highlight a few key areas of social strategy and related reports on the subject. In my view, those areas include:

• Online sales. For years, marketers have used testimonials to sell products and services, but that concept was foreign to most eBusiness executives in charge of online sales then USAA showed the way. USAA uses customer ratings and reviews to drives sales on their web site. The essence of the strategy is to use the “authentic voice” of the customer to win over would-be shoppers, and represents a great way to tap the good will that USAA has garnered over the years with it customers. During a nine month periord in 2009, the utilization of customer ratings and reviews drove nearly 16,000 incremental product sales.

After many months of analysis and hard work, we are very pleased to have published the B2C eCommerce Platform Wave report late last week. Some high-level conclusions:

• Demand for eCommerce solutions continues to be strong. This is fueled by homegrown and older applications under strain from growing businesses, by strategic multichannel initiatives, and by the cost to maintain these legacy systems. As evidence, 57% of online retailers have increased their eCommerce technology spending in 2010, and 27% of US online retailers are planning to replatform in the next 18 months.
• This is a transformative time in eCommerce. Platform solutions are changing rapidly. New solutions are coming available, and the current platforms are maturing quickly into multichannel solutions. We are very close to seeing the “e” drop from eCommerce Platform. And we are seeing that in our client inquiries and projects as well as seeing it in the evolving platform products.