Internet users change their mind about financial products after online research

Almost 66% of the surveyed Internet users have been reported to change their minds

With over 99 million urban Indian users now active on the Internet, financial services need to adopt a new approach to engage and serve the needs of the digitally savvy customers.

Online medium is the most preferred source of information for Internet users with over two-third of all Internet users using online sources when researching for financial products.

Almost 66% of the surveyed Internet users who were in the market to buy financial products changed their mind about the product and brand if it did not have details about its products online, said the Google study.

The report was compiled by Google India by combining the Google search trends in India and an independent research report conducted by TNS Australia on the influence of Internet on the purchase decision of financial products by Indian Internet users.

During the online research phase, The influence of the internet research was the highest for Loans (75% home loans, 73% personal loans) followed by Insurance (motor insurance 70%, health insurance 70% and life insurance 69%).

The report also revealed that during the research process - Internet plays an important role at various stages of the buying process with over 42% users saying they became aware of new products and brands, 58% said that Internet helped in their initial research and over 62% used Internet for intense research before deciding on their final purchase.

Rajan Anandan - Managing Director & VP Sales & Operations, Google India said, “India today has over 137 million Internet users, and a very high percentage of those users are urban users (99 million) with high disposable income. Given the reach of Internet to high value customers and its influence on the decision making for financial products - we believe that financial services can create significant value by innovating on the digital medium and adopting an ‘online first’ approach to serve the needs of the digitally savvy customers.”

While the final purchase of the product or service is still done offline - Internet research influenced 2 out of 3 applications - with 24% users buying/applying online, 70% applying offline and 38% buying offline influenced by online.

The total search volume for finance related queries are growing at over 43% year-on-year on Google. On searches coming from desktop - banking related queries account for over 73% of the total queries and is seeing growth of over 45% y-o-y.

Interestingly, one out of 10 finance related queries in India, comes from mobile. The increase in usage of mobile phones to surf the Internet for finance related information, with mobile queries on Google search growing 3 times faster than the searches coming from desktop.

In terms of percentage growth for search queries coming from mobile phones (banking queries grew at 85% yoy, investment related queries grew 105% yoy and insurance queries grew 75% yoy). Investment related queries in the mobile space are also the biggest category by search volume in the finance vertical.