IT-Enabled Sophistication Banking

Globalization of financial markets resultingfrom both IT (particularly internet standards) andincreasing homogeneity of regulation has stronglyaffected the environment, financial services companiesare operating in. Given these changes on the market,innovation is not a choice, but a necessity to survive.Observable today, however, are defensive strategies andpoor service quality. In this paper based on investmentsin trust relationships with customers we proposeSophistication (fit) Banking enabled by IT and qualifiedstaff. While traditional markets are characterized byshrinking margins and declining shareholder values,which can easily be explained by considering the digitalcharacter of financial products, new intermediaries forcustomer-centered Sophistication (fit) Banking have theopportunity of becoming spiders in the web andincreasing shareholder values constantly....