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Bank Innovation

Learning from Customers in Social Media

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I was recently interviewed by BAI Banking Strategies on the evolving use of social media in banking and wealth management.

Here is an excerpt from the article, which was published yesterday:

Nicols, a former executive with Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp, agrees that social media can warn financial institutions of potential problems. “You ought to be happy when a client is complaining because you’re learning something,” he says.

Young customers are more likely to be influenced by what their peers do than older customers, which, in turn, highlights the potential for social media, Nicols says. He cited the example of a customer who had a problem with his bank that was successfully resolved, which led to an enthusiastic recommendation of the bank to other consumers in social media. “There are whole businesses built on peer recommendations, such as Yelp,” which posts online customer reviews of businesses, from restaurants to bank branches, Nicols says.

Banks also have to use the right channels to respond to customer inquiries, Nicols adds, citing an occasion when a CEO of a technology company tweeted the bank that he wanted to talk to someone about a mortgage. The marketing department, which received the tweet and didn’t know how to respond, sent an email to Nicols, who immediately tweeted the executive. “Customers are giving you signals about how they want to interact and you need to pick up on those signals – or lose business,” he says.

Read the whole article here: BAI Retail Strategies

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Finovate Fall 2012 Best of Show Winners

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Another Finovate conference is in the books. The Best of Show winners included MoneyDesktop, one of the companies on my watch list for accelerating the convergence of high tech and high touch, and one that should have been on my list, but had eluded my foresight (Learnvest).

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New York welcomed the Finovate road show to town with weather was so perfect that it faded into the background like a perfect picture frame. For the most part, the show graced the perfect frame beautifully, with attractive and engaging interfaces being the rule. So much so that Aite analyst and Snarketing 2.0 blogger Ron Shevlin mused about the attendees being “SedUIced”  by interfaces over business impact.

It’s a shame that intermittent WiFi and cell coverage inside the hall occasionally defaced the exhibition with digital graffiti. If I hadn’t known that Javits Convention Center has distanced itself from its early reputation as a patronage mill for the mob, I would have thought that a few of the exhibitors had spurned pre-show shakedowns behind the dumpsters. (“It would be a real shame if that pretty app of yours somehow couldn’t connect to the network right in the middle of your demo…”)

Making the Complex Simple

A wise CFO I once worked with proclaimed that were two kinds of people in the world, those that make the complex simple, and those that make the simple complex.

There weren’t too many in the latter camp, the Finovate team screens and coaches demonstrators well. Still, a few seemed to have slapped technology onto a convoluted process and/or addressed an irrelevant problem; or as someone tweeted– solved problems no one has with technology no one wants. There were (only) a few moments that felt like SharkTank, and I secretly wished for the schadenfreude of a venture capitalist throwing a cold glass of reality on the smoldering embers of a bad idea.

But the majority of the demos addressed relevant problems and simplified the complex with good design, and most appropriately recognized mobile as a significant front in the fintech wars.

All of the Best of Show winners (in alphabetic order):

  • Credit Sesame: Mint and LendingTree had a very good looking baby. Credit-centric PFM with recommendations for managing debt.
  • Dashlane addressed the sometimes laborious process of filling out multiple fields for e-commerce checkout with a single solution for any vendor on any platform.
  • Dynamics showed a payment card with a built-in switch that enables customers to choose multiple payment sources. (Parenthetically, I “invented” this a few years ago in an ideation session. I also “invented” BetaMax when I was nine. And flying suits.)
  • eToro had an impressive demo of a pretty product that I happen to categorically reject. Their CopyTrader technology enables stock traders to harness the “wisdom” of the crowds in their own gambling, er, trading. It was a definite crowd favorite, but I have seen the prequels “Internet Stocks” (1999) and “Real Estate” (2007). They were both gripping thrillers with horrible endings.
  • LearnVest was a glaring omission from my pre-show list of three firms to watch. The firm and it’s founder and CEO Alexa von Tobel have been getting much well-deserved press, and their latest contribution to the convergence of high-tech and high-touch includes the ability to collaborate with a financial planner.
  • MoneyDesktop repeated as a back to back winner. Their patent-pending “bubble budgets” provide a nice graphical representation of budget items and they continue to refine their ecosystem with synching iPad, smartphone and desktop apps.
  • PayTap offered a slick and apparently effective solution for paying shared bills via multiple payment sources and social networks. They also pitched it as a way to make it easier when you are asked to help pay someone else’s bill. I’m looking for the blacklist feature on that one…
  • ShopKeep POS enables merchants to run a store from an iPad. Another great example of making the complex simple, with a great interface.

All in all, another great show full of smart people and innovative ideas, and another reminder that we are still in the early stages of disruptive technology in financial services.

This is really starting to get good.

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TechSpeak to English Dictionary

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Word cloud for Web StartupI am excited to spend the next two days peering into the future of FinTech as I watch and hear 60 companies demo their wares at Finovate. This TechSpeak to English Dictionary from Francisco Dao may be helpful for some attendees (and some presenters). Enjoy…

PandoDaily: The TechSpeak to English Dictionary

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Why More Experienced CEOs Will Stay At the Forefront of Tech Innovation

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This is as encouraging to me personally (“the average age of founders of technology companies is a surprisingly high 39 – with twice as many over-50 executives as those under 29 years old.)”, as it is generally (“The United States might be on the cusp of an entrepreneurship boom—not in spite of an aging population but because of it.”).

But I especially like the described “four character traits of a successful CEO – Sensemaking, Relating, Visioning, Inventing.” I couldn’t agree more, and I have seen an abundance of these traits in the CEOs I admire the most (and a dearth in those who leaving me scratching my head).

The Convergence of High Tech and High Touch in Wealth Management

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I wrote a piece for the popular fintech blog netbanker yesterday on how high tech and high touch are converging in wealth management, and what I will be watching for in that convergence zone next week at Finovate Fall 2012 in New York.

In the article, I mentioned that most of the notable traction to date has been in the payments space. One might not think that this “dumb pipe” portion of banks’ business models– moving dollars and data from Point A to Point B– would provide such fertile ground for disruptive innovation, but consider the impact and potential of players such as Finovate alums Dwolla and Simple, as well as Square, PayPal, and others.

I also noted in the article that innovative specialty lenders and crowdsourcing platforms are breaching what had long been banks’ deepest moat–  the ability to monetize their balance sheets. Most simply defined, banks’ primary function is to be a financial intermediary. Besides moving money from one place to the other, they hold excess capital when it is not needed for investment, and lend it out when it is; providing liquidity to all sorts of macro and micro markets along the way.

Oligopolists acting like oligopolists

Even though there are over 7,000 banks (plus a similar number of credit unions) in the U.S. alone, the industry has long operated as an oligopoly. For the most part, it continues to act that way despite disruptive threats from all around. After all, their primary product is the ultimate undifferentiated commodity, money. Bank A’s money isn’t better designed, sturdier or more portable than Bank B’s.

Parenthetically, oligopolists acting like oligopolists has a lot to do with the reason most consumers hold banks in just slightly higher esteem than they do the U.S. Congress. Banks integrated vertically and horizontally, they bought weaker competitors, they raised prices, they made up new fees, they cut costs and maximized profits for shareholders with scant regard to other stakeholders, like, you know, their customers.

Predictably, smart players from outside the industry have visions for better ways of doing business.

As frightening as any of these threats should be to any entrenched bankers who are paying attention, the ongoing march of innovation should be scaring them right out of their moire suspenders. Innovators are moving beyond solving the algorithmic problems of the industry and beginning to tackle more dynamic and heuristic areas, such as wealth management.

I continue to reference a recent American Banker article cited a KPMG survey that said 9 out of 10 banks were considering a major overhaul of their strategy, and that 40% said that wealth management was essential to growing revenue in the future.

Wealth management is an attractive business, and if done right, the business can also be a key differentiator, but it requires the ability to develop, manage and leverage intellectual capital beyond the commodity that is the bulk of many banks’ current business models.

Not all will be able to make the leap.

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