By Tim Ferguson, 3 August 2007 14:52
NEWS
Traditional investment companies have been encouraged to look into using web 2.0-style services to avoid losing out to newer niche players.
According to analyst house Gartner, more traditional brokerage companies with online trading services should look at using technologies such as RSS, blogs and community sites to cater for a new generation of customer.
Dave Schehr, research director at Gartner, told silicon.com that newer companies are already providing these kinds of services for investors to use to access information.
silicon.com Financial Services
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He said: "The focus is more on the community, on peer-to-peer sharing of information and the facilitating, corroborating and validating of that.
"It's really using web 2.0 in a native fashion. It's not just another means of doing the same thing we used to do in the physical world, electronically."
Schehr said more established web-trading businesses tend to view the internet as another way of delivering the "same kinds of things that are delivered through other mediums and other forms of communication".
For example, many companies still use PDF documents to distribute information. Schehr said: "It's still, in essence a print document that's just being shown in electronic form."
Although the newer companies are targeting niche markets rather than competing with large businesses, Schehr said bigger enterprises could nevertheless benefit from web 2.0.
Comments
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1. Rod Dowler
Properly used Web 2.0 can bring major efficiency benefits to brokers and customers and can also sometimes yield a big green bonus!
For example, in residential property, most advertising spend is still on printed newspaper supplements which give rise to thousands of tons of unread newsprint going straight to recycling (or not) each week.
By contrast, online property search provides precise information just to people seeking it and web 2.0 features make communication and collaboration between buyers, sellers and estate agents much more effective.