Find my latest posts on the Alloy Labs blog at AlloyLabs.com
Past posts are below.
Innovation | Strategy | Leadership
by JP Nicols
Find my latest posts on the Alloy Labs blog at AlloyLabs.com
Past posts are below.
by JP Nicols
Disruption is already here. It just isn’t widely distributed yet, as William Gibson famously said about the future.
Most of the disruption that we have seen in financial services so far has been on the surface, at the Experience Level. Customer touchpoints are often just digital wrappers around the same-old, same-old. Especially most of those created by incumbent financial institutions. Think of a simple financial app with limited functionality, such as balances and transfers.
A little deeper down at the Tactical Level, digital connective tissue such as APIs, cloud services, straight-through processing, and the like require more work to reengineer the underlying processes, but also enable more meaningful differentiation and operating efficiencies. Think of the best in breed financial apps, such as those from the digital-only challenger banks and the most innovative financial institutions.
At the core, or Strategic Level, the business is fundamentally changed, and new sources of value and new business models begin to emerge. Think of how blockchain and distributed ledger technologies can bypass the traditional financial gatekeepers and cut out the middlemen, or how Artificial Intelligence can replace teams of employees performing securities trading, portfolio management, and scores of other largely manual tasks today.
Technological progress sometimes comes in dramatic leaps and bounds, but most of it trickles on relentlessly, but often unnoticed until it’s too late. Organizations who lag in the Experience Level can see it, if they are paying attention. It creates an experience gap— the gap between the experience that customers receive, versus what have come to expect from other providers. This gap is getting wider as experiences from outside of financial services are becoming mainstream, driven by broad customer adoption of smartphones, tablets, and apps.
For instance, having a mobile banking app is not an experience differentiator at this point, it is bare-minimum table stakes if you hope to see any type of customer retention and growth in the future. Bank of America reported in their 4th quarter 2016 earnings report that weekly mobile interactions are exceeding weekly branch interactions by 12x, and the percentage of total deposit transactions taking place on mobile is increasing every single quarter.
If your institution is still playing catch-up at the Experience Level, you probably aren’t even noticing the work already being done to move to create development and communication standards for so-called “open banking”. The open banking movement may eventually turn banks into app stores, where customers can consume products and services from a wide range of providers, all connected to a central banking utility.
This platformification of banking, as Ron Shevlin calls it, is still very much a work in progress, but leading banks, such as BBVA, Capital One, Silicon Valley Bank, and others are actively developing APIs and working with fintech partners to connect and build new applications for customers. The result will be a massive reduction in operating expenses, and the ability to mass-customize products, features, and benefits to personalize the experience for banking customers. Exactly what most banks need, but you have to play to be able to win.
While innovation snobs may decry the lack of “real” disruptive innovation in financial services, the industry continues to consolidate, and the need to differentiate has never been greater than it is today.
Just wait until tomorrow.
by JP Nicols
Bill Gates has said “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose”. The sweet afterglow of success has a way of redefining as brilliant decisions all of the ways you got lucky, and glossing over a lot of little things that never were quite right along the way. It can also blind you to a shifting landscape and emerging threats and opportunities. The skills, strategies, and activities that got you to this point may not be the same ones that that can take you to the next level.
Blockbuster has become an easy punchline for those looking to describe the very public failures of a fallen giant, but the company was a giant. They were tremendously successful for nearly two decades, becoming the largest video rental store chain in the world, at one point controlling nearly a third of the home rental video market.
It’s hard to imagine from today’s digital perspective the pain points that consumers endured for a couple of hours of video entertainment, but it was a sorry state of affairs before Blockbuster came along. (Check out this time capsule of a guide for new video store entrepreneurs at the time.)
In 1985 Blockbuster founder David Cook pioneered the use of a customer database to better match supply and demand to the demographics of his stores, and the use of barcodes to manage a huge inventory of 10,000 movies per store, versus a few hundred in the average local store.
Suddenly customers had a much better chance of finding that new hit movie in stock, and the second and third choice options were now considerably better too. If you were in the mood for something different, you could browse rows and rows of movies, and now video games too, or get recommendations from a large and well trained staff. Gone were the pesky upfront membership fees.
Within a couple of years, Cook had sold the fast growing company to successful entrepreneur Wayne Huizenga, and it was soon opening a new store every 24 hours. The home video market was growing rapidly as the cost of VCRs came down, and the growth accelerated as videotapes gave way to DVDs. Over the next decade the company would continue to expand rapidly, eventually growing to 8,000 stores at its peak. The local video stores closed or were bought by regional chains, most of which were eventually acquired by Blockbuster.
The apocryphal story of the beginning of the end for Blockbuster takes place in 1997 when a California software engineer returned a rented copy of Apollo 13 back late and had to pay $40 in late fees. That engineer was Reed Hastings, and he started Netflix in August of that year.
Imagine what the first Blockbuster board meeting must have been like when they first heard of this new so-called “competitor”.
“They what? Mail you a DVD, then when you mail it back, they send you the next one on your list? I couldn’t imagine any of our customers wanting that. We have a store in every neighborhood, filled with thousands of movies with friendly and knowledgable staff. What’s next on the agenda?”
At the time, nobody was better at the business of renting out movies through physical stores than Blockbuster, and the company was busy leveraging its superior operating leverage to acquire just about all of its major competitors. The company was unquestionably successful at executing the industry’s dominant business model, but success was a poor teacher for helping them see the potential vulnerabilities of that business model, how the landscape was beginning to change, and how new competitors with new business models might challenge the status quo.
It was expensive to build and maintain all of those brick and mortar locations and to stock and staff them. Netflix had no physical locations to build and maintain and stock and staff, and they were able to create convenience advantages of their own. Renters no longer had to endure the weather and traffic to visit a store to find something to watch, they now could build their own queue of entertainment choices in the comfort of their own homes.
Netflix maintained one inventory that could serve the whole country. This larger market also meant they could profitably stock more rare, unique, and special interest programming, creating what Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson would later call “the long tail”. This advantage was further expanded as Netflix was able to reinvest its profits into developing their digital streaming service that would completely change the game and eventually come to dominate home entertainment.
In other words, Netflix didn’t beat Blockbuster at their own game, they changed the game.
Your business model works until it doesn’t, and your success in the past is a poor teacher for what it will take to be successful in the future, particularly in this era of rapid and dynamic change. Delivering this quarter’s results today is important, but don’t forget to set aside a little time to work on how you’re going to deliver even better results a few quarters from now.
Postscript: In 2000, Hastings offered to sell Netflix to Blockbuster for $50 million. Blockbuster declined the offer.
by JP Nicols
Six Sigma is a quality improvement program that gets its name from the concept of 99.9997% quality. In statistics, each sigma represents the statistical measure of 1 standard deviation from the mean in a range of outcomes in a normal distribution. Six sigma translates into no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities.
It is often related to (and sometimes conflated with) the concept of “Lean”, which was coined to describe Toyota’s manufacturing practices during the late 1980s, when their level of consistent quality was noticeably superior to much of what was coming out of Detroit at the time. Lean focuses on improving efficiencies by reducing waste through standardization and elimination of non-value-added efforts. Six Sigma, developed by Motorola and widely popularized by GE and others, focuses on improving quality by reducing process variation and using detailed measurement and statistical analysis. The two are often used in tandem in Lean Six Sigma programs.
Striving for this kind of consistent quality can save lives in healthcare procedures and plant safety. It is what we have come to expect today from our personal electronic devices and even from lower priced automobiles, and this is the kind of uptime we expect from computer and communications networks.
In financial services, it’s what we strive for in our transaction processing, statement production, compliance programs, and reliability of our ATMs and core systems.
Quality, consistency, efficiency, defect reduction, what’s not to like?
Lean and Six Sigma programs work well when there are identical operations and repeatable processes in large volumes, particularly when those operations can generate a lot of accurately measured data. When administered properly, they also focus on creating real value by improving quality, cost and customer satisfaction.
But what happens when you perfectly execute the wrong priorities?
Kodak was arguably the best manufacturer of celluloid film in the world (although Fuji Film might argue that one). Nokia was the world’s leading maker of mobile phones, with 48.7% market share in 2007. Sony’s Walkman was the leader in portable music for a decade. The quality of their operations was admirable, and not what turned out to be the achilles heel for those companies.
New technologies and new business models regularly disrupt the status quo. Blockbuster beat all comers in the business of operating video rental stores. They executed the standard business model of their industry better than anyone else. Netflix didn’t beat them at their own game, they changed the game.
Blockbuster is an especially good example for financial services. For most of the industry’s history, success has been about executing the same business model better than largely similar competitors. The winners of the consolidation wars over the past three decades have been those who executed with the efficiency that created operating leverage.
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all” – Peter Drucker
Efficiency and positive operating leverage are important ways to win the standard game in financial services, but they aren’t necessarily enough to counteract the new technologies and new business models that are changing the game now and in coming years. Nor will simply blindly going all-in on the latest in fintech hype. How can we balance operational excellence and efficiency with flexibility and innovation?
One of the drivers of the dot com boom and bust of late 1990s was the notion of ‘build it and they will come’. Billions of dollars of equity was invested in new technologies that were promising, yet unproven in the marketplace. Valuations got unreasonably optimistic, money flowed too freely, and millions of dollars of advertising was spent hawking products that not enough people wanted.
Eventually reality set in, valuations came back to earth, and the weakest value propositions died off. New wisdom prevailed from Geoffrey Moore, Steve Blank, and others, including Eric Ries who offered a better formula for testing ideas before making big bets. This process of Build, Measure, and Learn is a twist on “lean” methodologies that Ries detailed in his bestselling book The Lean Startup. But this ‘nail it then scale it’ approach is not just for startups.
In financial services we tend to think that if we can just get all of our smartest people in a conference room, perhaps supplemented with the best consulting minds we can rent from the outside, we can perfectly plan out all of our strategies and “roadmaps” down to the last detail. Then, all we need to do is execute them perfectly. Plan your work and work your plan. Simple, right?
But the marketplace has a way of making us look stupid when we make think we can plan for every contingency up front. Market conditions change, customer preferences evolve, and the competitive landscape shifts, so our plans have to be flexible and responsive to these changing conditions.
One Sigma in a normal distribution covers more than two-thirds (68.27% to be exact) of the outcomes. That’s not nearly good enough for heart surgery or network reliability, but it’s a pretty good indication that you’re on to something worth testing further.
The answers are outside the building, not inside the boardroom. The sooner we can test our ideas, the sooner we’ll know whether we should increase our bets or iterate to something better. That’s stacking the odds in your favor in the strategic planning process.
By all means keep those Lean and Six Sigma programs going where they’re working, but navigating these uncharted waters in our rapidly changing industry takes a new approach. It’s time to embrace the power of One Sigma.
by JP Nicols
Innovation is all about value creation.
Or at least it should be.
It’s easy to get caught up in the front end of the process. Brainstorming new ideas, drawing on whiteboards, and moving different colored sticky notes around the wall is fun. But all of that should be a means to an end. That end should be about creating value; whether it’s improving the customer experience, taking the cost out of a process, or creating a new feature or a completely new product category.
Most of the work I do is centered in financial services, which is not exactly known as an industry that excitedly embraces change. I spend a lot of time trying to convince leaders that they need to innovate, and that maintaining the status quo is a slow train to irrelevancy (and that the train is heading down a steep grade and picking up speed).
Over the past ten years (most of) the industry has gotten the message, helped more than a little bit by the perceived threats and opportunities of FinTech. A recent PWC survey showed that 83% of bankers said that at least part of their current business is at risk of being lost to standalone FinTech companies.
In 2013 I said that the innovation maturity of the financial services industry is best represented by a power curve, with a very small group of Leaders, followed by a small but growing group of Learners, and a long tail of Laggards. As we enter 2017 all three groups are still represented, but there has been some fattening in the middle as more and more Laggards have entered the status of Learners.
Learners get that just doing the same old same old is a sinking proposition within a rising tide, even if they’re not sure exactly what to do or how to get started. Naturally, they are often inspired by the cool and interesting things that the Leaders are doing.
This inspiration should be tempered with a strong chaser of reality. Some of the flashier things are simply what I like to call “Innovation Theatre”. Sometimes that’s intentional, part branding exercise to position the company as a thought leader in the minds of its customers (and/or competitors). Other times it’s unintended, a result of losing track of the whole purpose of innovation.
Shiny new objects can be compelling, especially to those people whose job description contains the word “innovation”. Don’t get me wrong, innovation labs that look like Silicon Valley startups, hackathons, and teams of bearded hipsters in hoodies leading design workshops are a few of my favorite things. But they too are just means to an end. (The great Steve Blank has his own deep thoughts on this. Read this if you’re thinking of standing up an innovation outpost. )
If you ask a group of people in a room their definitions (which we have done on many occasions), you often get back nearly as many definitions as there are people in the room. Some people cite examples of innovative companies or products, other mention technology, most people say something about “new ideas”.
So let’s level-set right here, our working definition for innovation at the highest level is this: Innovation is Implementing New Ideas That Create Value. We agree about the “new ideas” part, but everyone has new ideas. In order to count as innovation in our book, they have to be implemented, and they need to create value.
If you don’t implement the new ideas, or if they don’t create value, why did you waste organizational time and resources on them?
That value can be defined in a lot of different ways- new products or services, reduced costs, better customer experiences, extending the life of mature products, etc. – so organizations (and managers) will have differing views on value creation. More on that in future posts.
With that as a working definition of innovation in the broadest sense, most innovation work— at least that which is truly about value creation, not just branding— is usually much more bland and quotidian than the flashy activities of Innovation Theatre. “Blue Collar innovation” is how one innovation leader of a top 10 U.S. Bank recently described it to us. With one eye firmly fixed on a few key questions:
What value are we creating for whom?
What job does our customer need us to do here?
How do we know when we get there?
Clayton Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma will turn 20 years old this year. The lessons of how new technologies disrupt mature industries are still being played out today in financial services, media, transportation, and just about any other industry you can name.
In his new book Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice, he focuses on making innovation a reliable engine for growth, and it is centered on the Theory of Jobs to Be Done— “What exactly did you hire this product to do?”
Christensen points out that a primary reason why some new innovations don’t reach wide market adoption is because the new offering does not do a better job than the existing thing that the customer “hired” to get a specific job done (let alone overcoming the cost and pain of making a change).
Knowing that you are being disrupted and committing to doing something about it is an important first step. Focusing on the Jobs to be Done ensures that you’re solving the right problems for the right people in the right way at the right time.
That is value creation.
Anything less is just Innovation Theatre.
by JP Nicols
This is the last of my special Invested in Tech series with Capital One, where I have been taking a look behind the scenes at how they are using technology, innovation, and design to create a better banking experience. In my last post I spoke to Naveed Anwar who runs Capital One’s developer community partnerships and integrations, and he talked about their unique partnership with Uber.
It’s become well-worn trope in fintech punditry to declare such and such an app or company as the “Uber of banking”, presumably meaning both that it’s a seamless customer and payment experience, and also something with massive growth potential. When I speak at banking conferences I often ask for a show of hands for how many people use Uber as a way of demonstrating the rapid growth of disruptive technology. A majority of hands always go up, and it is easily in the 80-90% range in any major urban area.
I tell the audience that they would have called me crazy if I would have told them five years ago that instead of standing at the curb with their hand in the air they would soon tap a button on their smartphone to geolocate a nearby car, and then simply exit the car at the end of the ride. I also tell them that they may think I’m crazy now for telling them that soon that car won’t have a driver behind the wheel, but Uber is already working on that right now.
This on-demand seamless delivery is raising the bar for customer expectations in banking, and so is the Uber payment experience. To me the best part of the Uber payment experience is that there isn’t one. I don’t want a payment experience, I want a ride from point A to point B. It’s a great example of the “disappearance of payments” that payments expert Ginger Schmeltzer talked about at the Fintech Stage at the BAI Beacon conference in Chicago last month.
Lauren Liss, Senior Director of Digital Partnerships, Card at Capital One gave me a deeper look at how the bank is working with Uber to simplify life for their customers. In June 2016, they announced their partnership to create Uber’s first ever in-app loyalty experience: every 10th Uber ride was free when customers paid with a Quicksilver or QuicksilverOne card, through March, 2017. Then, earlier this month two companies announced they were evolving the offer to make it even more valuable for customers. As of November 1, customers get $15 in Uber credits – instead of a free ride (valued at up to $15) – every time they pay for 9 rides with a Quicksilver card through March 31, 2017. Unlike the previously earned free ride tokens, the $15 Uber credits can be used on multiple rides at any time through April 30, 2017.
The two companies have worked together since April 2015, and Liss says the relationship makes sense because of their shared focus on providing savings and convenience.
“To me, the best part about our partnership with Uber is that we’re able to create experiences for our customers that are simple and help them save.” says Liss, “This year we’ve created – and improved on – a valuable offer that comes with a clean user experience, created based on customer feedback.
Liss said her team is focused on creating solutions that simplify life for their customers, so embedding a loyalty experience into the Uber app – and then improving on it – helps deliver on those goals.
For more on how technology, innovation, and design are being leveraged to create a better banking experience, read my related interviews and listen to my podcasts with Capital One’s Global Head of Design Scott Zimmer, their head of digital Tom Poole, and their head of platform and developer community Naveed Anwar.
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Thanks to Capital One for sponsoring these posts and podcasts and for providing access to their team, but all of the opinions expressed are still mine, all mine. For more information about Capital One, visit www.CapitalOne.com
by JP Nicols
Last week I attended an IBM blockchain discussion at Rise New York, featuring Jalak Jobanputra, Founder and Managing Partner of Future\Perfect Ventures and Brigid McDermott, Vice President of Blockchain Business Development & Ecosystem for IBM, and moderated by Todd Pruzan, Editorial Director for Ogilvy.
You can catch the video of the event here, and also see my live tweet stream from the event here.
Blockchain technology has been at the most dizzying heights of the hype curve of fintech pundits for the past year or two, and while it may not quite fulfill all of the fantastic dreams that its most fervent zealots claim, it truly is transformational technology, and it’s time for even the most technophobic bankers to pay attention.
This is not a technical monograph on blockchain. If you want to dig deeper, I encourage you to read more from my brilliant friends Chris Skinner, Dave Birch, or Simon Taylor, or at least listen to our blockchain series on the Breaking Banks podcast, featuring all three of them, plus many other experts.
The concept of a blockchain—literally chaining blocks of data to one another— results in a distributed database or ledger system where all participants have transparent access to one true version of the data. This decentralized consensus creates trust without the need for a central administrator. Contrast this to multiple parties maintaining their own separate ledgers with everyone logging their own view of additions, subtractions and transfers.
The first blockchain was used as the basis for the bitcoin network starting in 2009, serving as a public ledger for all transactions. Over the last couple of years many new use cases have been envisioned outside of cryptocurrencies, and the panelists mentioned some on stage that reach beyond financial services.
Jobanputra says the current state of blockchain is somewhat analogous to the early days of the internet, and she sees opportunities for leapfrogging current technologies, especially in emerging markets. Mobile phones grew quickly in many emerging markets, leapfrogging the need for expensive infrastructure of landlines, and enabling financial innovation such as M-pesa for mobile payments in Kenya. Her firm Future\Perfect Ventures has investments in several blockchain companies, including BitPesa, which is blockchain-powered payment network in Africa.
IBM’s McDermott also sees blockchain as a way to reduce infrastructure and transaction costs and eliminate middlemen that create barriers to entry for individuals and smaller firms in both emerging and developed markets. In particular, she sees a huge opportunity in supply chain management— “getting the right goods to the right place at the right time”, which she says, touches everything in our lives.
Beyond providing greater transparency and visibility on shipments that can help reduce $600 billion of fraud global trade every year, blockchain can also reduce the high cost of sending confirming documents. Even more exciting to the panelists is the ability to link the blockchain to other technology, such as self-enforcing “smart contracts”, and cognitive computing to provide powerful analytics for things like demand forecasting. McDermott thinks this is where IBM’s enterprise approach to blockchain gives them a competitive advantage.
Yet, as blockchain spreads outside of financial services, it also brings it right back. Trade clearing and settlement are the areas most often cited as a prime opportunity for blockchain use in financial services, but payments, trade finance, currency settlement and lending applications are picking up steam too.
This democratization of the ecosystem is another threat to the traditional gatekeeper model of financial institutions, but it also offers a transformational opportunity for those that can think beyond reducing costs and improving transactional efficiency.
“Just ‘blockchainizing’ current processes very much limits the potential of what blockchain can do.” Says McDermott, “Where blockchain is going to be really valuable is where it helps transform the process, not just changing the technology of an existing process”.
McDermott also says she has to now think in “blockchain years”, where things expected to take a couple of years are now taking a couple of months. We are seeing this with financial institutions adopting blockchain technology dramatically faster than initially expected. IBM recently reported that 15% of top global banks intend to roll out “full-scale, commercial blockchain products in 2017”, and that 65% of banks are expected to have some sort of blockchain project in the works within the next three years.
William Gibson is more right today than ever: “The future is already here, it’s just not widely distributed yet”.
Thanks to IBM for sponsoring this post and my live-tweeting of their event, but all opinions expressed are still mine, all mine. For more information on IBM’s work on blockchain, visit IBM.com/blockchain.
by JP Nicols
I’m continuing my look behind the scenes at Capital One to see how they are using technology, innovation, and design to create a better banking experience. Last week at Money20/20, I spent some time with Tom Poole, Managing Vice President for Digital at Capital One.
I heard Tom speak on a panel called “The Role of Mobile Wallets in Streamlining Online and Mobile App Payments” at the conference, and I asked him afterward about his comments in the panel. I also recorded the interview for a Breaking Banks podcast.
Poole sees three types of mobile wallets. First, are the kinds from tech giants that are focused on paying at the point of sale and leverage the capabilities of their device, such as Apple Pay and Android Pay. Second are those from merchants that focus on their loyalty programs, such as Starbucks.
Finally, there are mobile wallets from banks, and Poole thinks banks have unique advantages in information and control. The bank authorizes the transaction, so they are the first to know when a transaction was approved, what it was for, who it was with, etc. That information can be leveraged to notify the customer on duplicate charges, or if a recurring charge jumped 50% from the month before, or that a trial period expired and they are now paying a recurring monthly fee, and so on.
There is a lot of buzz in the industry about making payments “frictionless”, but that’s not always a good thing. “Everybody wants to carve out steps that feel unnecessary or not value adding to the payment,” he says, but “there are times when friction is a good thing. Sometimes I need to be told that I’m about to pay for something that would completely be off of my radar screen.”
In fact, customers like certain kinds of “friction”, like notifications that give them knowledge and insights about where their money is going. “It appalls anybody paying five dollars for a subscription to a website they’re no longer using and don’t have need for.”
Poole says that the great thing about the customer experience in payments is that none of it is about the payment, it’s all about the information and experience that surrounds that payment. So his team is focused on making sure customers get the right information at the right time to make better decisions, and they work to bring in resources to help them save money and save time.
Many of the themes around experience design and a Test and Learn culture that come up in my interview with Scott Zimmer, Capital One’s Global Head of Design, also came up with Tom Poole. He described their user labs inside their buildings, and how his team uses them to find out how customers actually interact their products, sometimes finding that some of their “great ideas” turn out not to resonate with customers.
They use low fidelity prototypes and mockups to get more honest reactions from users. Customers often don’t want to insult the feelings of the team if they are presented with something very done and polished that obviously took a lot of work. Even with that amount of preparation, it still might be the wrong experience, so they pay a lot of attention to how real customers are reacting to finished products too.
Poole described an example where customers thought a “Tap to Pay” button on their mobile wallet app was broken because it took them over to Apple Pay. It turned out that they were looking for full bill pay functionality behind that button. So the team relabeled the button to read “Apple Pay”, and now the button did exactly what customers were expecting.
This insight also caused the team to add a link to bill pay, which was in the Capital One main banking app, a feature that they originally had no idea that customers would want in the mobile wallet app. “Two sources of customer frustration gone,” Poole continued, “but it took a lot of fine tuning to realize exactly that consumer expectations about what the app would do, and what we as designers thought it should do, were totally different.”
Even with all of that effort, customer experience and service design are still more art than science. As Tom Poole put it, “There are a thousand ways to mess up a feature, and really only one or two to get it exactly right”.
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Thanks to Capital One for sponsoring these posts and podcasts and for providing access to their team, but all of the opinions expressed are still mine, all mine. For more information about Capital One, visit www.CapitalOne.com