What are Statement Consolidators: Statement consolidators help investors who have accounts with multiple financial institutions (such as banks, brokerage firms, mutual fund companies and credit card companies), keep track of their investments and transactions. Some investors opt for simplification by consolidating their assets at one financial institution, bypassing the benefits of shopping around for specialized expertise and bargain pricing. For those who still prefer to utilize the services of multiple financial institutions, statement consolidators simplify matters by pulling the client’s account data from the various firms and presenting it in a single, unified framework.
State of the Art: Around the year 2000, the state of the art was a consolidated monthly paper statement. Today, now that all major financial institutions offer investor websites with daily, or sometimes even real-time, account information, cutting edge statement consolidators must keep pace by maintaining websites updated with similar frequency. Moreover, the best statement consolidators also provide analytics that keep clients apprised of opportunities to cut costs and improve returns, helping them avoid low-balance fees and interest rate penalties in bank accounts, and advising them about more advantageous credit card offers based on their spending patterns, for example.
Challenges: Once the necessary data feeds are established, with the client’s consent, from the various financial institutions, statment consolidators face a major hurdle in fitting the data into a common format. Not only do the data formats vary by institution, but so do the classification schemes for investment types, securities classes and transactions. Then, for statement consolidators offering analytics, capturing all the rules related to account fees and interest rates at the client’s current financial services firms and keeping them current is another major challenge, as is building and maintaining comprehensive, accurate databases of banking, investing and/or credit card options, terms and conditions.
Marketing the Service: There are two major routes that statement consolidators can go in marketing their services. One is to be an independent, standalone provider dealing directly with interested clients. The other is to work through financial institutions that seek to offer this service either for a fee or as a free premium to valued clients. In the latter scenario, the financial institution also benefits by gaining marketing intelligence about its own clients, getting a picture of the amount of business that they do with other institutions, business that it can then take measures to capture.
Job Opportunities: Statement consolidators need information technology professionals, to program and maintain the data feeds, databases, websites and analytics. They also need people with expertise in financial products and services, to design the analytics and consolidation algorithms. People who combine skills in both areas are especially valuable, particularly given the relatively small size and thin staffing of many players in this field.
