Mass Customization and Beyond — Evolution of Customer Centricity in Financial Services

For about a decade, mass customization is discussed as a generic methodology to individualize products and services while preserving cost-efficient production processes. Particularly for information-oriented industries like financial services, the advent of electronic business may create new opportunities to individualize products and services. In this paper, a product-oriented and a process-oriented approach to individualization of financial services are presented: On the one hand, by adopting configuration methods from mechanical engineering, financial services can be generated according to individual customer needs. On the other hand, by separating a production-oriented ‘factory’ layer and a customer process-oriented ‘integration’ layer in business networks, individual consumer processes can be supported holistically.