The last great breakthrough in financial services

I have reason to be thinking about the financial services industry these days, and in a recent conversation I made the offhanded remark that the Morningstar Fund Report was the last great breakthrough design in the delivery of financial services.

Thinking a little deeper about it, I might have been close to right. Morningstar released their first Mutual Fund Sourcebook™ to individual investors in 1984 when there was a real lack of digestible information to figure out whether a fund was a star or a dog. The timing was perfect, as governmental policy and business practices in the U.S. were putting greater focus on the 401k industry. Behind simple graphics like their Style Box™ is a wealth of data put together by a complex system, but reduced to the essentials needed by your average investor.

But for the sake of second guessing myself, here are some other honorable mentions:

• Intuit’s Quicken gave anal-retentive money managers the tool they’ve always dreamed of. It was a great platform for expanding into tax prep, small business tools, loan brokering, and many other things to make up a company with a $9BLN+ market cap.
• Schwab and E*Trade delivering trading access to customer over the web. It’s obvious now, but seemed kinda risky back then.
• ZIBA’s redesign of the Umpqua Bank experience to create a bank that actually encouraged you to spend time in their branches, rather than the industry trend towards just the opposite.
• Bank of America’s experimental branches in Atlanta, selected to test out and find new ideas for improving the bank (the rest of the story: supposedly the experimentation ended because they were measured by the same ordinary Profit & Loss as every other branch, and couldn’t keep up).
• The Ameriprise Dreambook (previously noted) that left the numbers out of financial planning, leaving that to the financial advisors.