The big multinational financial services institutions that are affected by the financial crisis have another issue to manage; addressing Asian consumers’ anxiety! As a result, the consumers in developing and developed Asian nations would prefer local banks over multinationals.
According to McKinsey Global Institute, “Almost 81 percent of consumers in emerging Asian markets and 63 percent of consumers in developed Asian markets consider it important to deal with a local institution.” Moreover, this preference is more attributable to upper and affluent segments across Asia.
As if there weren’t already enough challenges to manage for multinationals!
On a positive note, consumers across Asia do want to consolidate their banking and deal with one financial institute that can meet all of their financial services needs. Herein lies the opportunity.
But in order to take advantage of this opportunity, multinationals will have to dig MUCH deeper in localizing their offerings. More often than not, financial products / services and their corresponding content are derived at the home office. It is yet to be seen whether this role can be handed over to the local office/branch.
When it comes to localizing your products and services nothing will compare to your employees going out of their way to service customer needs. This factor might be the deciding factor in retaining customers. But in order to bring in these customers, customers need to be acquired and nothing works better for acquisition than localizing your Marketing campaign(s) for the various countries where your firm operates in Asia. Even within a single country there might be a necessity to further localize your Marketing campaigns. For example, there are cities in China that are close in proximity, but citizens might speak simplified version of Chinese in one and traditional version of Chinese in the other city. Not to mention Indonesia where every province has its own language, culture, religion, and history.