Finextra reported a new Forrester study today, which concludes that “Oracle and Temenos are set to continue their dominance of the core banking technology market as smaller rivals fall by the wayside and banks take a cautious approach to vendor selection in a consolidating market.”

The ongoing economic crisis is likely to accelerate an emergent trend towards consolidation among core banking tech vendors says Forrester. As the stragglers are picked off by the dominant players, the big are likely to get bigger and a smaller number of banking platform vendors will start to dominate the market even more than the top ones do today.

As such, it will be more important than ever before for banks to scrutinise the viability of banking platform vendors and their product lines in terms of regional and global success as well as product road maps, says Forrester.

What a week it was last week. The world is changing before our eyes.

What interested financial services companies a week ago may well now hit a brick wall. Our business intelligence team, calling into banks this week on behalf of various clients, have been met with everything from “I’ve just been made redundant” to “I don’t know what’s going on, I simply can’t talk to you – it’s all up in the air.”

So what action can you take, right now, to keep on generating leads? To make sure your marketing messages will continue to strike home?

1. Talk to your customers, more on this below

2. Find out where there is still opportunity to sell. (we’re tracking several of these areas – get in touch if you want to sign up for our email newsletters on this)

3. Find cost-effective ways of getting your message in front of people – and prove why you are worth their time

Our own experience, only last week, was showing that what mattered a month ago is seen as frivolous now. The unusual market conditions are definitely creating opportunities but they are not always immediately obvious.

To use a B2C example, The Sunday Times reported yesterday that John Lewis has seen a 247% increase in sales of hot water bottles versus this time last year. Presumably this is people trying to conserve their cash by keeping the central heating switched off. Makes thrifty sense, but not an immediately obvious market opportunity.

It goes to show that, in a time of unprecedented goings-on, no-one can know for sure what will work. For B2B, it’s back to basics marketing – the most important action you can take is to get out there and ask some questions of your clients.

Ask them how, in this new environment, they will be making decisions, ask what are the pressures they’re facing, and what is valuable to them now. Understand how their own customers are behaving. You need to really understand both of these aspects to be able to put together proposition and messages that will engage them in uncharted territory.

We’ve made available our own client insight questionnaire to speed things up for you. Download it here: customer-insight-questionnaire.Your buyers’ worries (and their urgent need for future performance) are a real opportunity – if you understand them properly.

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