The cover story of our latest Consulting Newsletter highlights some of the ways financial services companies are creating a personalized online experience for their users (to register to receive this free quarterly publication, click here). Personalization is a growing trend across the Web as a whole, and we expect to see a lot of personalization in online financial services in the coming years.

Fidelity’s advisor website is a perfect example of personalization at work. Faced with the challenge of addressing the needs of a wide variety of advisors, ranging from independents to wirehouse reps, the firm spent millions of dollars and several years creating a site that recognizes users based on their login information.

While the user views what they think is the full Fidelity advisor website, the firm can remove content that is either irrelevant to the advisor’s business model or in conflict with service agreements between Fidelity and the advisor’s broker/dealer. For now, these alterations are made on regional-, market-, or firm-level, but Fidelity eventually plans to create targeted sales and marketing campaigns on an individual basis.

To take the next step towards individualized websites, Fidelity and the rest of the financial services community will need to invest resources in data mining. The New York Times published an article this week highlighting the ability of top Web companies to track user habits. The article points out that companies that collect more user data put themselves in a better position to create a more personalized user experience.

Financial firms already have a tremendous amount of user information at their disposal – from personal data to spending and saving habits – and are in an ideal position to offer products and services tailored to the individual customer. By combining this data with the information mined from the way they use the firm’s website, companies will be able to push more focused promotional messages that better target customers.

Online personalization has vast implications for the financial services industry. Ultimately, it will allow firms to market specific products and services to existing customers in ways that were previously available only in an intimate (and more expensive), one-on-one setting.