Practice Management

What About the Overbanked?

May 17, 2013 by JP Nicols

I spent a great couple of days in San Francisco this week hearing from 72 FinTech companies at Finovate, stay tuned for my unique recap and thoughts from the largest Finovate ever.

As usual, there were several companies focused on improving access and service to the so-called underbanked– those who are priced out of traditional banking services, and those who simply opt out. This is a large market– several markets actually, and providing services people want and need at an affordable price is always good business.

But what about the Overbanked?

I’m talking about affluent and high net worth customers. Not because they don’t have sufficient access or because they are priced out of any markets. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Affluent customers have plenty of choices. Maybe too many. It is a market niche most financial institutions should be pursuing, but it’s hard to stand out to affluent customers.

Marketers hoping to reach the affluent need to tailor their offerings to be relevant. Messages about daily cash flow budgeting, for instance, can be powerful for the mass market and the underbanked. Every dollar matters and the timing of every dollar matters. It is worth spending time on activities that will save money by avoiding late fees and overdraft fees, for instance.

For many (though not all) affluent customers, it’s the other way around– they will often willingly spend additional money in order to save time. They will also spend money on unique experiences, as I have written about before.

(See Reimagining Bank Product Design in the Experience Economy)

A Moneyball Approach to Wealth Management

April 28, 2013 by JP Nicols

Smaller and midsized banks can play in the wealth management big leagues, but they have to use some Moneyball type tactics to compete and win against the big budget competition.

Before the financial crisis, a “Field of Dreams” approach worked– if you built it, they would come. An environment of deregulation, falling interest rates, a rising stock market and a seemingly unlimited supply of talent allowed banks the luxury of focusing largely on acquiring clients, almost regardless of cost. Now with compressed margins, skittish investors hoarding cash and a changing competitive landscape, new tactics are required.

In an article I recently wrote for BAI Banking Strategies, I detailed six key Moneyball strategies:

Bigger is not always better
Focus on the right metrics
Focus on wins, not hits
Look beyond allocated costs
Invest, support and challenge the front line
Role players can be more important than sluggers

There is no reason for smaller banks to resign themselves to the minor leagues, as long as they make the right investments in their wealth management business and establish the right metrics to manage them.

Read the entire article here: BAI Banking Strategies: A Moneyball Approach to Wealth Management

Reimagining Bank Product Design in the Experience Economy

February 21, 2013 by JP Nicols

When B. Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore wrote a book called “The Experience Economy,” they built on the work of Alvin Toffler (“Future Shock”) and others on the value of creating experiences. They cited Disney, Starbucks, Nordstrom and other leading brands as examples. Pine and Gilmore argue– and I agree– that our economy has been evolving, and continues to evolve.

We started as an agrarian society, and we extracted raw materials from the earth. Then we eventually began to make products from the materials we extracted, and we further evolved into delivering services. We still do all of those things, but they are all becoming increasingly commoditized. Think about banking products and services. How do you differentiate your brand from your many competitors? Interest rates? Fees? Product features?

Being able to stage memorable experiences, large or small, elevates your brand to a level far beyond the commodity discussions of features and price. Staging experiences allow you to connect with people emotionally, and surprising numbers of people decide with emotion and justify with fact—including the affluent. (How many of us can say we truly need to spend $6 for a cup of coffee, let alone a $2,700 espresso machine for our kitchen?)

Ultimately, being able to guide customers through a transformation is the highest evolution, and financial services companies are uniquely positioned to be able to do that. (Figure 1)

Winning with Affluent Clients

A KPMG study in June 2012 revealed that 9 out of 10 banks were considering a major overhaul of their strategy, and 40% said that wealth management would be an important part of that strategy. And for good reason— affluent clients hold higher balances, are better credit risks and use more fee-based services. But competition is fierce, and it is difficult to grab the attention of this busy demographic.

(See: 9 out of 10 Banks are Mulling an Overhaul of their Operating Models)

How do you become the bank your affluent clients can’t live without? There is no shortage of financial providers willing to help clients borrow, save, manage and move money. How can you add value beyond these utilities?

This may seem like a bit of a stretch for product managers typically steeped in competitive rate shops and price elasticity curves, but winning affluent clients in this new era requires some broader thinking about ‘products’ and about value propositions.

What business are banks in?

As I wrote in a recent American Banker article: Anyone who has taken even the most basic business course in the past fifty years is undoubtedly familiar with Theodore Levitt’s 1960 treatise “Marketing Myopia”:

“The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because that need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones) but because it was filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry incorrectly was that they were railroad oriented instead of transportation oriented; they were product oriented instead of customer oriented.”

So what business are banks in if they are not in the banking business? They are in the business of helping people achieve their financial and life goals, and the best brands differentiate themselves by reimagining the definition of ‘product’ beyond a typical set of tangible attributes.

For bankers, it is about moving beyond the rate and fee discussion and de-commoditizing the service offering. It is also about thinking more broadly about how to deliver value to clients, on their terms. Affluent clients have the financial assets to achieve their goals, but they are very often time-poor, and the wealthier they are, the more willing they are to trade dollars for time (and experiences).

I recently collaborated with Ten Group USA, the U.S. arm of London-based Ten Group, one of the world’s leading lifestyle management and concierge services companies to explore some ways financial institutions can deliver compelling clients experiences that might be outside of financial firms’ core capabilities.

In future posts I will discuss other ways savvy firms are innovating well beyond the typical rate/fee/feature conversation.

Clients Do Not Want Help. Until They Do.

November 27, 2012 by JP Nicols

(This was originally published as a guest post for my friends at the management consulting and strategic communications firm Beyond the Arc: Understanding how customers really want help.)

On the same day I published a post about the sometimes disappointing allure of technology (Technology is Not a Silver Bullet), the always insightful Discerning Technologist Brad Leimer shared a a post from The Financial Brand on LinkedIn (Big Study Examines Retail Channel Preferences).

The study, sponsored by Cisco, showed strong consumer preferences for non-branch channels such as web, mobile, phone and ATM for many types of interactions. However, branches were the preferred channel for such things as “Apply for a loan” and “Support from banking representative”. (See below)

What explains the stark differences? First of all, as Ron Shevlin of Snarketing 2.0 says, just because a person visits a branch for help or to complete a transaction doesn’t necessarily mean that they prefer to do it that way. It may mean that the web site or phone representative was inadequate to meet the client’s needs.

Secondly, and not to get all snarkety myself (that’s Ron’s sole province), but clients really don’t want your help. Until they do.

Results Not Process

Much has been written about the so-called “customer experience”– everything that a customer comes in contact with during their lifetime interaction with your brand; direct and indirect, obvious and subtle, conscious and unconscious.

Successful firms correctly attempt to measure the expressed and latent needs of clients. The best keep in mind the words of the great ad man David Ogilvy, who has been variously quoted as saying multiple versions of “People don’t want quarter-inch drill bits, they want quarter-inch holes.”

I have long found inspiration in the work of now-retired Harvard Business School professor David H. Maister, and I have been using some variation of his 2×2 matrix below for at least a decade.

Maister uses a healthcare analogy to describe the key operational and profitability metrics of different departments, and I have found it useful to help financial firms think through their various activities and how they provide value to their clients.

Pharmacy (Low Touch/Standardized Process)

For a financial firm, these are the things that just need to get done quickly and accurately. For the most part clients have little preference as to how.

–

• Account Opening

• Transactions

• Balance Reporting

• Transfers

• Basic Service Issues

–

Nursing (High Touch/Standardized Process)

These are items that might need a little more hand-holding, even though the processes and protocols are still well defined, and good client-service skills can go a long way to improving client satisfaction.

–

• Standard Credit

• Product Advice

• Estate Settlement

• Discretionary Trust

• Complex Issues

–

Brain Surgery (Low Touch/Specialized Process)

These activities require specialized skills, but the real value comes from applying the expertise, not necessarily from the advisor/client relationship.

—

• Custom Credit

• Asset Allocation

• Basic Trust Admin

• Complex Assets

• Basic Estate Plans

–

Psychotherapy (High Touch/Specialized Process)

For financial firms (and especially wealth management firms), this is the top of the value chain. It’s what happens here that drives most loyalty/at-risk measures. Diagnosis is key, and it is from here where brain surgery may be prescribed.

–

• Goal Setting

• Financial Planning

• Complex Estates

• Succession Matters

• Nonfinancial Issues

• Moral Support

–

Bringing it All Together

Clients may well be willing to use your new app for certain things, utilize your web site to download transactions and contact your call center to change their address. Those things may improve your operating margins– as long as they work.

The face-to-face interactions that do the most to improve the client experience are not the ones that solve the issues that could have been (and should have been) solved via other channels (See two surefire ways to irritate your customers. It’s the ones where they are really receiving the time and attention from someone who understands their situation and their goals and is helping them get to where they want to be.

Clients don’t want your help. Until they do.

Five Shifts that Define the New Era for Wealth Management

November 6, 2012 by JP Nicols

5ShiftsGraphic

Five massive foundational shifts are impacting financial service providers of all types, and they are impacting those that serve affluent clients in especially unique ways. Many of the strategies, skills and behaviors that enabled success in the past are now at best ineffective, and completely irrelevant in some cases. Advisors and firms serving affluent clients must adapt to these new realities to be successful in the future.

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”

— General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff, U. S. Army

The first shift is economic. The global financial crisis begun in 2008 is still having a long-term impact on the creation, growth and preservation of wealth. Today’s low growth, low yield environment will likely stick with us for some time, and today’s advisors have to be able to help their clients navigate the realities of the new economy. Firms cannot count on rising portfolio values to increase revenues.

The second shift is regulatory. Partially as a result of the financial meltdown, central banks and regulators all over the world are the in middle of redefining the rules and regulations that today’s financial advisors will likely have to live by for the rest of their careers. Some of the important revenue streams of the past have been curtailed or eliminated—think overdraft fees, payday loans, interchange fees, some mortgage fees, etc. And we are not even close to done, as of October 1, 2012 only one-third of the provisions of Dodd-Frank had been finalized, and another third have not yet even been proposed.

The third shift is demographic. Various research projects that anywhere from $18 Trillion and $56 Trillion of financial wealth will be passing down from the Traditionalist and Baby Boomer generations to their Generation X and Generation Y children and grandchildren over the next several years. Gen X and Gen Y could have a combined wealth that exceeds that of the Baby Boomers as early as 2018, and they do not want “their father’s Oldsmobile”. Even with the more conservative estimates, this is a huge threat for those advisors and firms who don’t adapt to the changes. And it is a massive opportunity for those that do.

The fourth shift is competitive. The global financial crisis caused the weakest firms to disappear while the biggest and strongest got bigger and stronger. (In some cases, only bigger.) It is more important than ever for smaller firms to differentiate themselves in ways that are really relevant. Simply being “the bank” of, say Cozad, for example is no longer enough.

The fifth shift is technological. The tools are already here to radically improve client intimacy and client engagement. The rapid adoption of the iPad and other tablets give wealth managers the opportunity to change the dynamics of the across-the-desk transaction into the shoulder-to-shoulder collaboration that really engages the client. Big data and analytics give firms the power to better understand client behaviors and preferences, if they bother to listen. Social media opens up whole new avenues of client contact.

The challenge will be for firms to adopt the right strategies and then have the discipline to execute. As in every era, we will have winners and we will have losers, and success will go to those who embrace the possibilities of the future while staying relevant to their clients.

Improving Client Engagement with Technology

October 18, 2012 by JP Nicols

Readers of this blog know that my primary focus is the convergence of high-tech and high-touch that I believe IS the future of wealth management. I think Balance Financial gets this better than most fintech firms, and that is why I am proud to serve on their Advisory Board. Read on…

Demystifying Social Media: It’s All About Business Strategy

September 28, 2012 by JP Nicols

(I originally wrote this as a guest post for the management consulting and strategic communications firm Beyond the Arc. You should check them out for a lot of great information on customer experience, strategy, analytics and social business. I will be speaking on a panel on How to Monetize Social Media with their CEO Steve Ramirez, along with Citibank’s Frank Eliason, cited below, at the BAI Retail Delivery Conference on October 9.)

I am sometimes asked to give social media advice to others in financial services.

“I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself a social media expert,” I once told a counsel-seeker.

“You’re a banker with a blog”, he shrugged, “the bar’s pretty low.”

Well, ex-banker now. I now run my own consulting business for financial advisors and firms, and many of them have questions about social media strategy. I often start by quoting Ron Shevlin, Aite Research analyst and Snarketing 2.0 blogger:

“There is no such thing as social media strategy. There is only business strategy.”

— Ron Shevlin

It is not uncommon for business managers to seek the holy grail, the silver bullet that when deployed, will magically transport their business to new heights. In the late 1990s, it was the internet. Lousy businesses added “dot-com” to the end of their name, changed their logo to purple and green, and threw up a website. They were still lousy businesses, and the internet didn’t change that. In some cases, it may have even accelerated their demise.

Social media is just a tool to use in running your business. There is nothing magical, or necessarily even compelling about it. Lots of very successful businesses have small or nonexistent social media presence. Frank Eliason, Global Head of Social Media for Citibank, and author of the book @Your Service: How to Attract New Customers, Increase Sales, and Grow Your Business Using Simple Customer Service Techniques, cites Apple as an example of a well-run, much-admired company that does not focus much on social media. Retired athlete Michael Jordan’s page has nearly triple the number of “likes” of Apple’s page, and dead musician Michael Jackson has nearly seven times as many.

Transparency: Good News and Bad News

Participating in social media increases the transparency of a company’s operations and people, which is a positive thing for most customers. The bad news is that poor practices and behaviors are highlighted as well. If you have a dumb policy or poorly trained people or a bad product, that will become readily apparent even sooner through social media. Maritz Research found that 51% of consumers who complain via social media expect to be contacted, but that 85% of those outcries are not addressed at all.

I sometimes air complaints and compliments via Twitter, partially as a social experiment. The range of results is stunning. I had a sleepless night in a Westin hotel due to a loud banging noise caused by a problem with air in their pipes. I tweeted my frustration and was contacted within hours by both the hotel management and their Starwood Preferred Guest loyalty program, and each offered me apologies and compensation for my inconvenience. My frustration was quelled and I remain a loyal SPG guest.

Quite the opposite experience I had with a major retailer. I was not having any luck reaching someone on their 800 number with the authority to reverse an express shipping charge to correct their own mistake, so I tagged them on Twitter. The next day I received a tweet apologizing and asking me to call in with a “reference number”, but when I called in, I was right back at the low level where I had begun. The “reference number” was meaningless and no one on the phone had any more information or any more authority than on my original call. I try to shop elsewhere.

What is Your Business Strategy?

What are today’s key business challenges and how can social media help?

Acquiring new customers

How can you use social media to differentiate in a crowded business and gain market share over the competition?

Monitor social networks for disgruntled customers of competitors. Respond better than their own providers.

Run targeted ads to reach your ideal customers efficiently.

Demonstrate your expertise and thought leadership through blog posts, white papers, case studies, etc. Not only does this showcase your unique value, it helps prequalify prospects searching for specific solutions.

Be there when prospects are looking for the services you provide. The CEO of a major social network tweeted that he was trying to reach someone from my last bank about a mortgage. We were just starting to monitor Twitter and our social media team sent the message to me, so I responded on his terms– on Twitter.

Retaining existing customers

Half of bank customers are considered “ripe for change”, and most change because of changing life circumstances.

Monitor social networks for disgruntled customers of your own firm. A problem solved promptly and well can create more loyalty than a customer who experiences no problem at all.

Make your customers aware of current relevant offers or promotions. Providing offers only to acquire new customers is a turn-off to your existing customers.

Provide multiple channels for sales, inquiries, questions, and problem resolution.

Make sure you are providing your customers a way to engage in two-way (or multi-way) conversations. Social media is not just a soapbox from which to hawk your wares.

Expanding relationships with existing customers

In the consumer banking business, as many as 80% of customer relationships are unprofitable. Those statistics may not be accurate in your industry, but some variation on the Pareto Principle (the “80/20 rule”) tends to exist in every business– a small number of customers typically provides profitability to subsidize the vast majority.

Make more of your relationships profitable with relevant offers for additional or complementary products.

Incorporate social data into propensity-to-buy models using predictive analytics.

Pay attention to changes in life circumstances that may call for additional services. (Weddings, babies, moving, etc.).

Leverage your platform for mass customization.

The View from the Bridge

No matter what business you’re in, it’s likely you are dealing with these basic issues. A social media presence won’t make them go away, and poor social media practices will make them worse. Focus your business strategy on solving relevant customer problems, and leverage social media as an enabler. There are plenty of social media experts who can design just the right digital campaign to reach just the right markets with just the right messages –but first, ask yourself a key question (and one that we have discussed here before): Are you repainting the walls, when you have a serious crack in the foundation?