Brett King - bestselling author and the founder of the world’s first direct mobile-only bank Movenbank.
Today in Singapore we’ve had a gathering of a collection of real innovators and disruptors in the financial services and customer experience space. The line up at #NextBankAsia was a bunch of strong influencers in the space including: Scott Anthony @scottdanthony James Gardner @bankervision Richard Kelly and Andrea Kershaw from @IDEO Neil Cross from @Microsoft [...]
Why do we use cash? Why do we use banks? The basic premise is that banks are necessary to create a flow of cash and enable commerce, with built in protections. Secondly, they can hang on to our money securely, and although we don’t get much interest these days, we do generally have the protection of the FDIC or some other mechanism to ensure we never lose our deposit. However, these days when we deposit money it just generally sits on some computer as ones and zeros, we don’t physically (or vary rarely) go down the the bank and actually deposit cash over the counter. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I ever deposited or withdrew cash from a bank branch. I know I go to the ATM to get cash out, but all my deposits these days are generally electronic.
The problem with pervasive mobile payments is that the value proposition for my bank just got cut in half. In a very short period of time, I may never even have to use my bank’s ATM at all. I certainly won’t be using checks. In fact, the last check I wrote was more than a year ago – so I won’t miss them…
Banks face huge organizational barriers to rapid innovation and in many cases still don’t conceptually appreciate the need for rapid change around customer. It appears that banks know how to run banks, but as they are pushed more to be something more akin to software houses, design houses, and integrators, their organizations are just not built for new priorities.
Is there a solution that still allows banks to be banks, but opens up bank networks, products and services to a broader community who are in a better position to innovate.
Developing point-of-impact opportunities where bank product or services are integrated into customer experience is going to take more than an innovative bank. It’s going to take an open capability, a library of APIs, automated credit risk assessment and straight through processing. Once in place, however, these tools will enable almost unlimited innovation of the customer experience without the constraints of a bank organization chart, channel silos or outdated financial metrics…
