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The client is king.
The investor takes centre stage. Simple products, less risk and more advice. These are the pillars of the new financial economy; the real one is based on reducing costs and going green.
We are living a new era. The problems we have seen in financial giants have led the sector to resolve to mend its ways and make an act of contrition.
The client has to know what he is investing in. A very complex product does not necessarily mean a high yield. The tendency is to go back to simpler investment instruments that are easier to understand.
Another consequence is that risk levels must be controlled. What is known as leverage. Many advisors recommended this debt strategy to their clients. An idea that brought them huge losses.
More personalised private banking
This is the new scene in which high-wealth investors are operating, protected by stock markets which, after the collapse, have proven to have sufficient muscle to return to the growth path.
Investment banking is also reinvented. More conservative products and more long-term investment, and goodbye, for now, to instruments like structured products.
Private banking will be more personalised and simpler; or it will simply disappear. Big players, like UBS and Banif, are faced with the challenge of leaving the Madoff hangover or the Lehman Brothers bonds’ nightmare behind them and gain the confidence of investors.
All of which within a world order that seeks to reinvent some of the financial rules that govern it, as well as some ethically-dubious models.
Tax havens have been singled out and identified as one of the culprits of the crash. As the terrain of lack of solidarity, tax havens handle more than 13 billion dollars.
To put an end to such excess, the international community is seeking to eradicate them. Andorra intends to stop acting as a tax haven and Switzerland has undertaken to reduce its level of opacity.
Adaptation to demand
If the financial economy is reinventing itself, so is the real one. The battered real estate market is shifting towards 'boutique development', where supply is fully adapted to demand. In terms of price, location and size.
Even great architects of this century, such as the British, Norman Foster, have perceived this new trend and are calling for sustainable architecture, where ecology is the key.
Meanwhile, other services, such as logistics and transport, will be smaller (the companies); and activities like tracing more efficient routes and finding synergies will be the order of the day. We will see corporate operations.
We are knocking on the doors of a new era.
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Published in Finances and Services by Miguel Ángel García Vega on 30/03/2010
This article has been read 993 .
The mortgages to come.
"Only for 80% of the valuation price and, for better conditions, signing up for other banking products That is the picture of most mortgages. What’s new? ""No floor"" and low-cost have become sales arguments."
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