Supporting the Process of Customer Consulting in the Field of Financial Services

An increase in competition and a change in customer needs has caused financial service companies to revise their operations and establish a coordinated product and market strategy. Customer consulting is a substantial part of this type of strategy. Due to the increasing number, complexity and diversity of financial products, the client adviser is confronted by a continuously expanding range of required expert knowledge, which in most cases extends beyond his capabilities. To deal with these problems, supporting the consulting process with information technology seems to be appropriate. At a glance, the usage of currently employed advisory support systems indicates that the system support does not fulfil the financial company's needs. For this reason we developed ALLFIWIB to actively support every phase of the client advisory process as well as to improve upon the quality of financial product supply. ALLFIWIB is designed as a blackboard‐based distributed problem‐solving system. Initial usage of ALLFIWIB has indicated that the system is capable of providing intelligent solutions to financial problems and thus considerably lessens the burden on the client adviser.