"Financial Broker Virtual Week”, “Economics - The Future Consumer” here are the key takeaways:

As part of Brokers Ireland “Financial Broker Virtual Week”, I was invited to speak about “Economics - The Future Consumer” and here are the key takeaways:

1. Enterprise Ireland offers a super mechanism to fund innovation and collaborate with universities. Also Ulster University Business School and lots of other business faculties are open for business in this regard.

2. Low-code development offer ways that businesses can learn what their customers want in real-time. I gave a demo of how I turned a one-minute Airtable survey into a dashboard of insights as quick as the audience was filling it out. Gartner quote that “65% of application development activity will be low code-by 2024”.

3. Mass personalisation requires you to think how you can automate a tailored service for your customer based on what they want, what you have on offer and how they change. I gave a quick demo of how we can match people based on what they know and what they want to learn at Active Peers AI and then how customer feedback tools like Hellonext.co work. A Deloitte study shows “20% of consumers would pay 20% extra for personalized services”.

4. Lots of businesses are focusing on the environmental aspects of their businesses and that’s very welcome. However, many are already helping their customers and communities through the “S” of “ESG”. I showed the audience “Money Matters”, the book I wrote with CFA Society Ireland and The Educational Company of Ireland (Edco) to democratise financial literacy right across the country. Today that book is in every secondary school and is available for general sale at https://lnkd.in/ern3x3mn. If you’re contributing towards sustainability, tell your customers and communities! Also, Larry Fink from BlackRock quoted in his recent letter “During 2020, 81% of a globally representative selection of sustainable indexes outperformed their parent benchmarks”, so this area is all the more important for financial services.

5. The #Metaverse is simply a transition of a 2D web experience to 3D. This could really change the whole meaning of the word “hybrid” when it comes to interactions with consumers. We’re already using AR in many ways (every Powerpoint is an example), so we need to watch out how others are adopting the metaverse into mainstream (eg Microsoft Mesh). Statista quotes that “74% of adults in the US said that they were going to join or were considering joining the metaverse”.

6. Personally, I believe in hiring on attitude and training on skill. Our talent pipeline to serve our customers of tomorrow can benefit hugely from initiatives like Springboard+ which bring together third level institutions, government funding and the relevance of skill demand in industry today.

7. I presented a full episode of my ESG & Tech show with VectorVest, Inc tailored around Robo Advisor. If you’re interested, check it out at https://lnkd.in/ezWcWKXy

Thank you PJ Walker for the opportunity to collaborate.

Sign up for our newsletter here to keep up-to-date on future events.