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. 

From Bloomberg to Snoopberg

The shock news of the day, or not, is that Bloomberg’s reporters have been spying on their customers.

Or that’s the suspicion anyway, and was kicked off by Goldman Sachs complaint that a reporter from Bloomberg had telephoned to find out why an employee of the bank had not logged on to their Bloomberg terminal yet.  Had they lost their job?

Apparently, reporters at Bloomberg did the same in 2012 when trying to find out what was going on at JPMorgan over their London Whale  incident.  There are also concerns that they may have been tracking Tim Geithner, US Treasury Secretary, and Ben Bernanke, Head of the Federal Reserve.

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 ALL banks will change core systems

There's a theme that keeps cropping up at most conferences I attend around the remodelling of banks.

It came up again today in a discussion about data leverage at the Asian Banker Summit, and it occurred to me again recently, when I chaired the future focused day at IPS 2013.

The theme is how do you turn a vertically integrated business that owns the customer process end-to-end and organises itself around products and channels, into a horizontally structured business that wants to provide functionality to the customer at their point of need and organises themselves around the customer’s data.

That’s a long sentence and, for those who get this, it will make perfect sense.

This is why I wouldn’t bother writing anything further, except that this is so fundamental to the dialogue we’re having that I feel the need to break it down step-by-step.

Asia always teaches me something: this time it's M&M

This week is Asia week, with a brief jaunt to open the Terrapinn Cards & Payments Summit in Singapore, followed by engaging in the Asian Banker’s Annual Summit in Jakarta.

I always enjoy visiting Asia as you gain unique insights you don’t see elsewhere.  Over the past years, Asia is where I first saw NFC/RFID (Octopus, Hong Kong), mobile wallets (Edy from NTT DoCoMo, Japan), mobile banks (Jibun Bank and eBank, Japan), virtual currencies (QQ, China) and QR codes (Tesco, Korea).

There’s far more that Asia shows me, so this will be an exciting week.

The week starts with the honour of being asked to cut the ribbon to officially open the Exhibit Hall at Cards & Payments ...

... and what I note straight away is a focus upon RFID chips and M2M (Machine to Machine) transactions.

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 real cause of the Bitcoin bubble and burst

All the media has finally woken up to the Bitcoin phenomena when the value of Bitcoins rose from a steady $20 per coin to $266 last week … only to crash to $100 by the end of the week.

What caused this?

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:

Creating an agile, designer IT Shop from a CIO who knows how

Time to head home after a day in India at the launch of the new design centre for finance launched by Polaris Financial Technology in Chennai (Madras for the old folks out there).

As you walk into the Design Centre, you are greeted by a map of the world ... completely made out of Indian Rupees!

A fascinating trip, not least because Polaris has injected something into software development that I have not seen before: creativity.

This was clearly demonstrated by Michael Harte, CIO of Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA).

Over the past five years, he has replaced the bank's core systems, moved much of the banks services to the cloud, created many apps and innovations that have given CBA global recognition and more.  

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.

The latest stats on Bitcoin

I’ve written a lot about Bitcoin over the last year:

• Is Bitcoin the future of money … or are we smoking dope?  (October 2011)
• Bitcoin: immersive or subversive? (January 2012)
• You should take Bitcoin seriously (September 2012)
• A new currency payment system is about to explode (February 2013)

But had a sanity check when looking at the charts that relate to this currency.

There are a whole variety of charts from the number of daily transactions:

Mobile’s time has come

It’s the Mobile World Congress week this week, so everyone’s talking about mobile.

In our space, the big announcements came from MasterCard and Visa.

MasterCard launched a digital wallet in a joint venture with mFoundry, whilst Visa announced an NFC partnership with Samsung.

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.

If you didn't think a payments revolution was taking place, think again

If you didn't think there was a payments revolution taking place, then think again as dealmaking websites like Groupon, Living Social and Huddlebuy have been pushing payments systems. 

It makes startling and notable change when you see consumer-based services pushing merchant and business based services at low cost.

How do you implement a strategy that works?

A good friend of mine, Robin Speculand, recently spoke to our Financial Services Club in London about implementation. 

It was a popular night, primarily because implementing strategy is really difficult.  In fact, coming up with a good strategy in the first place is a major challenge then, having got a strategy, getting the organisation behind the strategy and implementing the darned thing is even harder.  Yet, according to Robin’s annual survey of organisations, most companies are engaged in developing new strategies and four out of five people believe their company are good at developing new strategies … but the majority of people think they are bad at implementing strategies.