Designing for Cost Transparency in Investment Advisory Service Encounters

Abstract

Clients of investment advisory services are generally dissatisfied because of the services' lack of transparency. In general, advisors do not provide clients with transparent and detailed information on costs. Such information, however, is of much importance, since an investment portfolio's costs directly influence its effective return. In this paper, we present a design science research cycle on how cost transparency may be provided in client-advisor encounters as a feature of collaborative tabletop artifacts. We find that our cost transparent design positively influences the client's perception of the service encounter as well as its results. Not only are clients more satisfied but also do they declare increased willingness to pay for the cost-transparent service.

Elicitation of Requirements for the Design of Mobile Financial Advisory Services -- Instantiation and Validation of the Requirement Data Model with a Multi-method Approach

“…Recent studies addressed tablet-supported FAS [31,32]. We build on this existing body of knowledge and gather specific requirements for a mFAS, which also allows for location-independent client interactions.…”

“…Nussbaumer et al [31] and Möwes, Puschmann and Alt [28] emphasize the importance of focusing on specific customer segments, e.g. retail, corporate or private banking customers, when it comes to designing such new services.…”

“…Traceability of decisions and transparency: Another customer requirement suggests traceability and transparency of investment decisions [2,9,31,33]: There should be a protocol of the information exchange between the RM and the customer. Videos, phone calls as well as chat feeds should be accessible by both the customer as well as the RM (INT04): "…you could say, as of 2 o'clock this afternoon you have mentioned you wanted to buy 2000 shares and you agreed… yes lets go forward with the deal."…”

“…Moreover, recent studies show that a shared interface on a mobile app may facilitate a more transparent information exchange and thus may address information as well as interest asymmetries [31,38].…”

Communicating Nascent Design Theories on Innovative Information Systems through Multi-grounded Design Principles

“…The past DSR activities in our research group often targeted the design of innovative IT artifacts in collaborative work environments like advisory service encounters. Although we (and our research group) published DSR related articles in the past years in the domain of travel agencies [11,12] and the financial industry [13][14][15], we often faced a number of problems during the writing process, which sometimes even hindered the publication of valuable design knowledge. (1) During the course of such a projects, design knowledge exists at various levels of maturity at any given point in time (i.e.…”