We've Only Just Begun (the Internet Revolution)
There was an important article in today's Ignites (subscription required) that really speaks the importance of monitoring your competitors' Internet efforts. Speaking to the Investment Company Institute yesterday, Google's chief Internet evangelist said that the Internet revolution has only just begun and "although this revolution may not be televised, it will be broadcast to the hips, pocketbooks and laptops of an increasingly mobile and connected community."
Further:
As the Internet continues to reshape customer expectations and how companies manage their own operations, fund companies face the prospect of either learning to adapt or being eliminated by the competition, Cerf said.
"Darwin was right," he said, noting that only the technologically fittest firms will grab market share from those with weaker operations. "Companies will need to adapt to the new economy."
For one thing, as use of the Internet continues to evolve, so too will customers' expectations of how they communicate with mutual fund providers and advisors.
We've longed believed that financial services firms must adapt to the Internet or lose competitive ground. How do they figure out how to do that? The first step is to keep sharp tabs on what your competitors are doing online. Next, they need to identify best practices both within, and outside of, the industry. Without tooting our horn too loudly, we believe that Corporate Insight has the best process in place for helping firms accomplish these goals.
Let's assume for a moment that you don't already use us (gasp!), you should still have some internal system for looking at the competition. When doing so, it is important to remember that a "once-in-a-while" approach won't do it. Things move too fast in this space to take a haphazard approach to monitoring your rivals. The landscape tomorrow could be vastly different from what you see today. You need to have a sustained, ongoing approach to competitive intelligence if you want to preserve - or, better yet, improve - your position in the marketplace.
It's one thing to stay on top of your obvious competitors, but it's also important to keep your eyes on the white space. By that I mean it's not enough to look exclusively at your direct competitors. Doing so ignores threats from upstarts (see Mint, et. al.) Moreover, best practices from an online standpoint are often developed outside of financial services - look no further than retail leader Amazon.com.
For the past 10 years, we've watched the Internet reshape the financial services landscape. There is no reason to think that the changes over the next 10 years would be any less significant.
From time to time, we update our passwords to ensure we have the best security possible. While technological advances in website security have made it safer to manage your finances online, users are still wise to keep their login passwords fresh. Fortunately for us, firms have made this a fairly streamlined process, with the Change Password function usually in a quick and easy location. While we are all in favor of a streamlined process (consider changing around 60 of them at once, like we do), this chore should not be too simple; for safety precautions, we understand the need for ID verification questions. 
While so much attention across the financial services industry these days is focused on baby boomers, we discovered 
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