The financial services industry is vast and diverse, with a career path for everyone from bankers to investment managers. To find the right fit, it’s important to understand what the industry encompasses. It’s not only about banking, investing, and insurance; it also includes everything that touches money.
The industry’s broad base means that it has a profound impact on people and businesses in big ways. While the term “financial services” may seem simple, it is actually quite complex. It involves banking, investments, insurance, and the redistribution of risk. The industry is comprised of thousands of depository institutions, credit-card companies, providers of investment products, mortgage and other loan companies, insurance companies, and the vendors that support these activities.
To provide the best services to clients, financial service firms need to be able to anticipate what their customers are going through at any given moment in time. To do so, they need to be able to track key indicators of customer behavior, such as their engagement with other products or spending patterns. Then, they can develop a product or service that will be relevant to them at that point in their lives.
The globalization of the industry has also meant that the infrastructure and systems that support it need to be able to function in different countries and time zones. To accomplish this, financial services firms have developed leading edge technical solutions to ensure business continuity in the face of disaster or disruption. These include primary, local secondary, and remote tertiary recovery capabilities.