Aging societies need new strategies

In any case, larger segments of older customers not only will save less, they will have a lower demand for mortgages and consumer credit, and likely a reduced appetite for risky products. That doesn't just imply a reduced interest in derivatives or structured financial products; individual investors typically reallocate their portfolios away from equities as they approach retirement. Once in retirement, they purchase annuities or simply spend their savings. As a result banks might want to focus on offering certain bundled product offerings, such as annuities combined with life insurance.

Financial institutions should also be on hand to offer assistance with people providing their own retirement and healthcare. This shift is driven in part by the uncertainties surrounding government provision of such services－but also represents an opportunity for banks to find new revenue streams to offset what will be declining ones.

While financial institutions are focusing on responding to younger generations by integrating financial services into their digital lives, financial institutions should not underestimate the power of technology to respond to the challenges of an aging population as well.

Retirees typically move at least once after retirement: first toward a leisure destination such as on the beach in Hainan then back to be close to families. In general, people appreciate care and personal advice as they become less agile and reluctant to move to branches.

Digital solutions that might resonate with elderly customers include remote advice via video connections, intuitive applications and easy-to-use services that smoothly cross their laptops, and mobile phone and ATM options. As tech startups focus on developing phones with braille for the visually impaired and voice recognition that converts audio to texts for the hearing impaired, banks will be able to offer more mobile services to customers with hearing and sight loss.

This trend should lead banks to focus on their customer segmentation further, creating differentiated end-to-end bank services, products and branding for older customers, younger ones, and by gender.

Financial institutions also need to be prepared for regulatory intervention. It is a sweeping generalization, but young people and old people tend to make more mistakes when it comes to banking than middle-aged people. We can already forecast changes: Some of the new regulatory areas under consideration globally include enhancing rules about the disclosure of terms, imposing new fiduciary duties on sales agents, and establishing a system for prior financial product approval－all moves driven by a desire to protect customers who might be prone to mistakes.

Banks, therefore, need to be nimble and flexible: in how they market products, what they sell, and how they are distributed to each of the client segments. Our vision entails a strategic transformation of the banking industry toward "just-in-time banking" where banks assemble the right products and services at the customer's point and time of need.

This vision implies a technology-enabled, real time operating model that is built from a combination of managed service operations, cloud services and analytics together with a modern core banking system, where services and information are aggregated across an ecosystem of suppliers.

Juan Pedro Moreno is Accenture's senior managing director of global banking and co-author of A New Era In Banking. Albert Chan is Accenture's managing director of China financial services. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.