The Financial Services Club's Blog

Banks designed for humans by geeks

I was going to move away from further debate about branch and omnichannel today, as there’s far more interesting stuff about Google giving payments away for free with Gmail and PayPal doing the same with mobile, but that will have to wait until next week as yesterday’s post created quite a stir.

I guess it was the mention of Apple (whose glossy rosy tint has reduced of late).

Or maybe it is that core message about designing for humans rather than money.

In fact, I did toy with the idea of Banks designed for humans, not geeks as a title, as the techno crowd fall into the same fervent misnomer as the branch crowd.

Equally, most get this wrong because they built their operations for one point of emphasis – branch, call centre, internet – and now are struggling because no longer do we deal with channels, we deal with a human at their point of need or want or desire or thought.

This is what the data geeks are really drilling down for: to get to the customer 24*7 as they have financial needs, wants, desires and thoughts, and that is why today's title is Banks designed for humans by geeks. 

Not bank branches again (yawn, zzz, duh, wtf)

The hardy perennial discussion of whether we need branches or not comes up again this week.  It’s a regular debate on the blog and in the Financial Services Club, with various entries that are relevant to contribute towards the debate:

• To dump or not to dump the branch (2007)
• Branches Wanted: Dead or Alive? (2009)
• The branch-based banking model is dead, Part One (2009)
• Branch-based banking is dead, Part Two (2009)
• Bank branches are not dead (2011)
• Do banks need branches? (Financial Services Club Debate, 2012) 

It is a discussion that never goes away because no-one knows the answer.

Predictive, proactive, proximity based payments

After my discussion about the augmented economy which focused upon customer service, I thought about it from the other side: transactiosns.

Many years ago, my technology firm made a play for banks to deploy data warehouses to perform predictive analytics based upon consumer propensity models of their data-based behaviours.

It may sound a little complex, but basically it was meant to use data patterns to predict what the customer would do next and whether they might need some new financial service. 

The augmented economy

In the middle of my showreel, I talk about augmented  lifestyles.  I’ve talked about this for many years, but now it is becoming an augmented reality, especially with the launch of Google Glass.

Why banks MUST wake up to the mobile social revolution

I was asked to join a panel discussion on social media during a recent conference.

A social media masterclass, as it was called.

Interesting.

Sure, I’ve been blogging and tweeting and facebooking for as long as I can remember, but does that make me a master of social media?

I don’t know, but here’s what I said so you decide.

Some fintech firms' marketing stinks

There’s an old saying that cropped up the other day in respect of Margaret Thatcher’s son, Mark. It was a joking reference by Margaret that her son was so clever he could sell “snow to eskimos or sand to Arabs” or, as one wag put it, arms to anyone.

Anyways, it’s a message worth remembering as most fintech companies could not sell sand to eskimos, snow to Arabs or guns to anyone, as they have no idea how to market or sell their wares.

The future is visual banking (still)

One of the discussions I was having recently was around a future vision for banking, and the idea of branchless banking reared its ugly head again.

As mentioned many times, I don’t believe in branchless banking in the future .. just less branches for banking.

Anyways, this discussion veered in another direction that also rang my old bells: remote visual banking.

Just as we Youtube everything, the idea that your banking would be serviced through a remote advisor who you could chat with onscreen came up as the ideal way to be serviced in the future.

This is a theme like branchless banking, cashless society and biometric authentication.  It keeps cropping up and then disappearing again.

The question is: can we really have a future where the bank deals with customers via remote visual media?

Yes.

How many emails do you get every day?

I don’t always praise, but I will shower some praise on British Airways today.  Not for their service, flights, destinations or lounges, but for their inflight magazine Business Life. 

It always inspires me a little as, each month, the BA Business Life magazine publishes a bunch of trivia facts that are useless, apart from giving you a moment of reflection of life today.

So here are some of their most recent useless but interesting facts:

Princess to Queen

They say that women control most of the spending in the world (or is that men in the world?), so I was amused to see this advert for Citibank during my recent trip to India, as it appeals to this share of wallet.

You may disagree, until I heard my male colleague say:  “Yes, and from Prince to Pauper”.

Happy Easter and Happy Holi (and Passover et al)

See you next Tuesday.

Banks are just data vaults

There have been several themes I’ve explored on the blog lately that are the foundations of my latest presentations:

• Mobile is irrelevant, it’s the behaviours that are key
• Money is meaningless, it’s the data that is important
• Capitalism is dead, we are now ruled by social capitalism 
• Privacy has gone and security is our greatest risk

The themes of all of these blog entries are that banks need to think about how they reconstruct themselves for the 21^st century.

What this really comes down to is that banks are becoming pure managers of bits and bytes of data.

A new currency payment system is about to explode

Before leaving the subject of socialisation, gamification, personalisation and virtualisation, there’s one last area that is worth delving into.

This one came up when I was working on my latest iteration of the way in which money is evolving, and I have the firm belief that the exchange of value digitally will be as, if not more, disruptive than the exchange of goods physically.

Don't forget socialisation and gamification: tomorrow's banking today

Building upon the discussions about personalisation and virtualisation, these are important.  In fact, as I’ve mentioned before, personalised, virtualised in real-time on my mobile is PFM-squared (does any of that last sentence make any sense?).

So then I was recently asked to address a conference with a mix of banks from all sectors, and to give examples of innovation in each of these different banking sectors.

The examples I picked had one common theme: social finance.

From personalisation to virtualisation: tomorrow's banking is here today

Checking out this morning’s news , I discovered this new innovation from Wells Fargo where you can get personalised ATM messages.

Good news for all banks … except Britain’s

I mentioned that I’d just attended the branding in banking conference this week.  It was organised by the Banker Magazine, and is in its seventh year of operation.

The headlines this year are:

• The UK is the only top 10 country in The Banker / BrandFinance® Banking 500 to see the total value of its bank brands fall with a net loss of $1.5 billion

The bank that removes the friction will win

Talking of no-one giving a jot about customer service in banking, there is a subtle nuance here which I thought someone might have spotted or commented upon but …

The nuance is that any organisation that takes friction out of the transaction process has the potential to change banking considerably.

There are several examples of how such friction removal or rather frictionless commerce occurs, and they are all the subjects we usually choose:

Banks only survive because of regulations

We recently celebrated the two hundredth birthday of Charles Darwin. 

Darwin, the man who broke through the prejudiced views of the religious world of the Victorian era by being brave enough to say we were descended from apes and not created by God.

Bank trust is at an all time low

I recently hosted a meeting of financial market players to talk about how to rebuild trust in banking. 

It was an interesting evening, with most of the attendees accepting that trust in banks was at an al-time low. 

But how low is an all-time low?

Capitalism is dead, long live capitalism

Following on from my previous two polemics:

• Stop talking about mobile, it's not important; and
• Money is meaningless

I’m now moving on to the final contentious point which is that capitalism is dead.

We all knew that capitalism died in 2008 when the crisis hit, or at least the Anglo-Saxon version of capitalism that was all based upon selfish greed.

The self-serving focus of modern society was evident throughout the last decade, and no more so than the unexpurgated world of me.

That has changed and is changing.

Try to destroy yourself … and then do it

One of the panellists at this week’s conference said that he employed twenty people whose sole duty was to find a way to destroy the business.

I liked the idea of that.  It is a strong and emotive statement.  But what did he mean?

“I employ twenty people in my innovation department who purely look at ways in which they could destroy the current business.”

2012: Technologies create the Perfect Storm

The #1 buzz phrase that everyone has grown to hate (especially Ron Shevlin) is Big Data.  Sure, you may hate it, but it is still pretty important, as I blogged a wee while ago.

A second area that has become so over debated that it is dull is Mobile.

Add Cloud and Social to the mix and you have the perfect storm of overheated technobabble.