4 ways that technological innovation will change wealth management. Last week, having updated its volume forecasts for the third time this year, Paypal predicted the end of the physical wallet, suggesting that within just 4 years digital currencies will overtake traditional payment methods, radically changing the way we buy and pay for goods and services.
Yet for every press release announcing that the future’s arrived, there’s another describing the slow uptake of mobile banking and asserting that UK customers still prefer to hear from financial services providers by post. It’s tempting for businesses to latch on to the latter as reasons not to change, excuses not to prepare their operating models for the technological transformation that is not just challenging the status quo of wealth management, but moving it on to a whole new playing field. But the reality is that change is indeed happening, and it’s happening faster than ever before. Back in 1943 Thomas Walton, chairman of IBM spoke of a world market for “maybe 5 computers”. Cashless payments. Online CFD handel. Valutaomregner. Google Finance. SAS SWOT: final call to establish a sustainable Scandinavian Airlines.
SAS has been through many restructuring programmes and capital raisings over a number of years.
Yet it still has high unit costs and poor labour productivity, is loss-making and has a weak balance sheet. In 1QFY2013 (Nov-2012 to Jan-2013), the group's loss before tax and non-recurring items widened to SEK801 million from a SEK656 million (EUR78.7 million) loss a year earlier. Nevertheless, it continues to target a positive pre-tax result and an EBIT margin of more than 3% for FY2013. The Nordic region contains a more efficient long-haul operator (Finnair) and is experiencing increasing penetration by short-haul low-cost operators from elsewhere in Europe. Also, in Norwegian Air Shuttle, SAS has a low-cost local operator that competes with it on both short-haul and (from this summer) long-haul.