Email Management in European Financial Services: Leveraging Incoming

The number of incoming emails at European banks grew more than 200% between 2000 and 2002. Celent predicts that European banks will receive over 12 million incoming emails from clients and prospects by 2005.

The tremendous growth in volume and popularity of incoming email has created new challenges and heightened needs for tools that will create greater efficiency and productivity. In a new report, "Email Management in European Financial Services," Celent analyzes the current state of the email management in the European banking industry.

European banks have a complex approach to dealing with incoming emails. Currently they are promoting the Internet channel for marketing and sales, and creating HTML forms for clients who wish to receive information about financial products and services. European banks continue to remain fearful that the convenience of email could cause the number of client interactions to escalate dramatically, jeopardizing the efficiency of the organization.

"Banks are reluctant to accept unstructured e-mail for two main reasons: efficiency and security. But we estimate that the convergence of two technologies, Web mail and e-mail management software, will resolve those issues," comments Axel Pierron, Celent analyst and author of the report. "European banks understand that implementing Web mail will overcome the security issue; in fact, we’ve see a 57% increase in banks providing Web mail since last year."

The report details and evaluates the different technologies available to face the challenges implied by the massive adoption of email by banking clients. It also provides a ranking of the leading European banks by their ability to manage incoming emails.