Service innovation in retail and corporate finance through digital enablement

Services – both product-related and product-independent – play a fundamental role in modern economics. Not only are services driving employment growth, but their increasing share in GDP is a testimony to their role as a value enhancer through demand and stimulation of investment efforts within the broader economy. Services also ensure the particularization of consumer goods while providing the necessary supporting activities for the latter’s mass marketing among final customers. The ongoing digital transformation that our economies are undergoing is acting as an accelerator for this trend. By adopting more innovative technologies – be they new or existing products as well as new or existing business processes and models – service providers aim at increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of their value-creating and value-delivery processes in order to differentiate themselves from their rivals, achieve customer satisfaction and loyalty, outperform customer expectations, achieve cross-selling opportunities, and replicate their efforts and benefits.