In the Face of Customers’ Changing Behaviour, Should Italian Banks’ Approach to Online Trading Remain the Same?

Abstract

What drives the behaviors of banks and their customers in times of profound changes? The modern crisis affecting economic and social systems has significantly diminished customers’ willingness to invest, and this trend, together with improved information about financial services, has made them more price sensitive, more rational in their decision making, and thus more challenging for banks to attract. Therefore, banks have invested in projects to improve their internal processes and online services, in particular by deploying web 2.0–based mobile banking and payment opportunities. In the Italian banking sector, 12 years after the publication of “New Distribution Models for Financial Services: The Italian Banks’ Approach to the On Line Trading Development,” this article considers how general and structural changes in customer behavior and the banking sector have affected the strategy banks use to provide online trading services, including the use of outsourcing and new managerial practices.