Top 4 Spend Categories in Procurement Within Financial Services

June 6, 2012 - PRLog -- ith a lack of growth, tougher regulatory controls, changing customer demands and the financial markets contracting and consolidating, banking, investment management and insurance companies are increasingly looking at their procurement teams to improve efficiencies, reduce costs, and promote innovation to create a point of differentiation and competitive advantage.

As the face of financial companies change, procurement teams are under the spotlight to understand market and company-driven concerns and employ procurement solutions to help solve them.

So what exactly do the heads of procurement in the financial services plan on spending their money on right now? ProcureCon conducted a recent poll with several procurement leaders in the financial space in companies including Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, AXA, BNP Paribas and many more, to find out and in this article we present the top 4 most popular categories of spend in 2012:

4. MARKETING

Coming in 4th in our poll, representing 7% of the total votes marketing is clearly playing a vital role to making sure that while business may be in decline for many it is critical to make sure your company is the first in line. However there is some concern from the industry that cost savings in this area are particularly difficult as it more relationship-based than almost any other spend category.

One interesting observation is that while commentators are hailing the internet as the hero of cost-effective, targeted marketing in place of vast spends on primetime TV slots and glossy magazine spreads, it would appear that the web is not entirely shielded from megamoney deals. Several of the companies we spoke to cited multimillion pound spends with financial service comparison websites including those relating to meerkats, moustachioed opera singers and popular Arabic comedians as one of the key marketing spends this year.

To read this report in full please visit http://www.wbresearch.com/procureconfs/knowledge_portal.a...