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FinTech

Preview: Bank Innovation Conference

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Here’s where to find me the next couple of days while I’m at the Bank Innovation conference in San Francisco. I’ll report back next week with implications on the intersection of leadership, advice and technology.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Session 1:  What Is “Banking” Today?  A Debate on the Future

  • How can banks realize the dream of “holistic” banking considering legacy challenges
  • What do the most successful start-ups tell us about the future
  • Which conventional wisdoms about the future of banking are wrong
  • How does the branch and ATM fit into the concept of the Future Bank?

Panelists:

Noah Breslow, Chief Operating Officer, On Deck Capital

Shawn Budde, Co-Founder & Chief Risk Officer, ZestCash

Dan O’Malley, Founder & CEO, PerkStreet Financial

Jeff Stephens, Founder, Tribed and CBC

Session 2:  New Product Strategies & Possibilities

  • Where the consumers are, now
  • Innovations worth noting and ones worth ignoring
  • How CFPB and Dodd-Frank realities color product design
  • The future of PFM
  • How should “commerce” integrate with “banking”

Panelists:

Philip Jenkins, Chief Operating Officer, Strands Finance

Rafael Lopes, VP, Sr. Product Manager – International Products & Digital Channels, City National Bank

Iker Marcaide, Founder, Peer Transfer

Todd Sandler, Head of Product Strategy & Deposits, ING Direct

James Shanahan, President, Shanahan & Associates, LLC

Josh S. Turnbull, Managing Consultant, Advisory Services,  Center for Financial Services Innovation

Session 3:  Social Banking Without Being Insecure or Annoying

  • Elements of an effective Twitter strategy
  • The mobile piece explored
  • Is it possible to successfully leverage location apps?
  • How does banking become a part of the social media experience?

Panelists:

Kimarie Matthews, VP of Social, Wells Fargo

Josh Reich, CEO, Simple Finance Technology Co. / BankSimple

Eric Rinebold, Industry Principal — Digital Engagement, Infosys

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Session 4:  Channel Agnosticism: Being Everything to Every Customer

  • Getting more consumers to embrace innovation
  • Usage trends
  • Overcoming the challenge of balancing customer wants and legacy system realities
  • Can branches be maximized?
  • What are the operational challenges that need to be overcome in order to be truly channel agnostic?

Presenters:

Ginger Schmeltzer, SVP, Digital Channel Management, SunTrust Banks

Geoff Knapp, Vice President, Online Banking & Consumer Insight, Fiserv

Julie Milbrand, Vice President, Community Banking, Internet Services Group, Wells Fargo

Session 5:  Separating Digital Wallet & Mobile Payment Fact from Fiction

  • One wallet or multiple wallet platforms? What level of integration can we expect or is necessary?
  • What’s out there now? What’s on the way? Where does NFC fit in?
  • Loyalty, points, rewards and virtual currencies
  • The future of cashless payments

Panelists:

Bill Clark, President, Spindle

Mark Fischer, Chief Executive Officer, Inspire Commerce

Michael Garelik, Financial Services Innovation & Mobile and Alternative Payments Specialist

Omar Seyal, Co-Founder, Tagstand

Eric Remer, CEO, PaySimple

Session 6:  Shop-aholic: Integrating Banking Into a Better Shopping Experience

  • Rewards and banking
  • Payments platform implications for bankers and retailers
  • Where do ATMs fit in?
  • How the digital wallet fosters better retailing?

Panelists:

Marc Caltabiano, VP Marketing & Products, Cartera Commerce

Lewis Gersh, Managing Partner, Metamorphic Ventures

Samir Kothari, Co-Founder, Truaxis

Brian Rigney, VP & GM Business Solutions, CashStar

Session 7: The Organic Online/Offline Twitter Ideastorm

  • During this session, we’ll undertake a good, old-fashioned brainstorm, but using newfangled social media with ideas aired live and via Twitter converging into a dynamic blend of innovation and a glimpse of the future.

Session 8:  App Crazy: Postcards From the Edge of Digital Banking

  • Why certain apps work, and certain apps suck
  • App update by device
  • What’s the next new-new thing?
  • Smartphone vs. tablet vs. both

Presenters:

Eric Connors, SVP of Products, Yodlee

Joe Adams, Managing Principal, Hampton Pryor Consulting

Top Ten Geek Week Sneak Peeks – Part 2

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Today: The GeekWire Summit

Startup technology news site GeekWire held its first birthday party on March 7 with the GeekWire Summit. Speakers included former Microsoft Chief Software Engineer and Cocomo co-founder Ray Ozzie, former Swype CEO Mike McSherry, Hulu CTO Richard Tom, T-Mobile CMO Cole Brodman, Rhapsody President Jon Irwin, venture capitalist/serial founder Oren Etzioni and other great technology minds. Nothing was focused on FinTech per se, but nonetheless here are some highlights and potential implications on the intersection of leadership, advice and technology in financial services:

“How do large companies innovate? They buy small companies.”

– Oren Etzioni

  1. On the rise of social collaboration in the enterprise, Ray Ozzie paraphrased Ethan Zuckerman (who also has a lot of interesting things to say about how we tend to interact with people who are most like us, but that’s another post) in describing the “scopes of voice” as public/private/secret/self :“I think when you get into enterprise and business scenarios, there are some organizations where speaking publicly in a public voice is very useful. Professional services firms promote an internal culture where speaking openly and being known as the professional who knows something about something works a lot better than certain manufacturing company, where the internal norms might be different in terms of secrecy and confidentiality.”  There is still lots of opportunity, but also lots of work to do, since only 27% of financial professionals use LinkedIn, and less than 4% use any other social media methods at all.
  2. Do you think that building a massive base of clients/users/followers is in direct conflict with customizing your messages to be relevant individual users or subgroups? Consider that Hulu  has 1.4 BILLION ad impressions per month, but they offer some innovative ways for users to customize their ad content. Ad Selector allows viewers a choice of three ads from one brand or one ad from a selection of three different brands. Ad Swap allows viewers to find ads that are most relevant.
  3. Great discussion on the state of mobile technology. All on the panel had praise for the Windows Phone platform, but noted that they have a long way to go with a 4.4% market share to Android’s 49% and Apple’s 30%. (IMHO, I think that RIM’s enterprise-centric 15% share is the most vulnerable to Windows, and it’s already down 2% in the last three months.) Former Swype CEO Mike McSherry said that Apple’s Siri natural speech style will help improve text entry over time too. This evolution to more natural interfaces and input styles was also noted at Micosoft Research on the prior day.
  4. Startup investor and advisor Hadi Partovi noted that the cost of sequencing the human genome has gone from $1 billion to $1,000, and predicts it is heading to $100. If that can be democratized, how naive are we about “big finance”?
  5. Facebook’s Director of Engineering Jocelyn Goldfein said that the company rolled out the new Timeline with a team the size of a startup. Facebook video chat? One guy. In Seattle. Although, that may be taking the lean approach a bit too far. (As someone retorted on Twitter “That explains a lot.”) Still– how many consultant engagements, project managers and steering committee meetings do we need to make meaningful change in our business?

“It’s not enough to encourage employees to innovate.

You have to protect them from the cost of failure.”

– Jocelyn Goldfein, Facebook

(P.S. – I live tweeted my new startup idea from the conference: Embedded QR codes in public carpeting. Remember, I get a 20% Founders Fee.)

Yesterday: Microsoft Research TechFest 2012

Top Ten Geek Week Sneak Peeks – Part 1

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This week I really got the chance to embrace that inner geek that’s just dying to break out of my pinstripe suit. On Tuesday I had the chance to visit the Microsoft Research TechFest 2012, and celebrate twenty years of Microsoft Research (Shout out to my host Juliane Carlson). Then on Wednesday I attended the GeekWire Summit and got to hear and meet all kinds of interesting people doing all kinds of interesting things. Here are some highlights and potential implications on the intersection of leadership, advice and technology in financial services:

Today: Microsoft Research TechFest2012

“The unanticipated results are often as important as the anticipated ones.”  

– Peter Lee, Microsoft Research

  1. Multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) conversion. The demo was oriented around an American using GPS to navigate around Beijing, but imagine being able to serve non-English speaking clients in situations where multilingual employees might not be available or practical.
  2. Lots of projects involving Big Data, including FetchClimate, a massive mash-up of global historical climatic data made instantly accessible. Easily useful as-is to assist in assessing branch locations, client real estate projects, etc.
  3. Another Big Data project is ChronoZoom, which is a “…dynamic cloud based data visualization tool where educators, researchers and students can easily consume, compare and understand the history of the cosmos, earth, life and humanity. Where they can easily consume rich media sets like: audio, video, text, pdfs, charts, graphs and articles in one place and discover new possibilities.” Imagine a financial markets version of this product with every price and correlation of every financial instrument for the past 80+ years.
  4. IllumiShare is desk lamp with camera that allows people to share physical or digital objects across the internet. Imagine a client who has questions on their trust document (or paper statement from your luddite competitor, because of course your institution has a secure digital document exchange with e-statments…). They could flip this on from the kitchen table of their beach house and you can see it all on your screen, even mark it up or highlight key areas.
  5. Multitouch is still evolving, and the Wearable Multitouch Projector can turn virtually any surface into a touchscreen, including the palm of your own hand. The current prototype looks a little bit like  first generation home camcorders with a shoulder bag processor and a shoulder mounted projector, but it will undoubtedly evolve. No touch is evolving too, building on the Kinect interface, including potential touchless interaction in surgery.

Tomorrow: The GeekWire Summit

You Do Realize This is a People Business, Don’t You?

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Bankers sometimes have a hard time understanding why their industry has satisfaction ratings right down there with utilities, cell carriers and bankrupt airlines. Maybe it’s because they sometimes have more in common with these business models than they would really care to admit. Companies and industries that score poorly in customer satisfaction tend to treat customers like replaceable cogs in their profit machine, rather than empowered consumers with unmet needs and lots of alternatives.

Source: flickr.com via David on Pinterest

David Armano has an amazing knack for boiling down sometimes complex concepts to compelling and easy to grasp infographics. And while the one above was intended to depict a much broader economic view, I think it works just as well in the narrower context of financial services.

It’s not a Wonderful Life any more

Financial institutions have long since evolved from the folksy image of It’s a Wonderful Life‘s Bailey Building and Loan. Competitive forces drove the financial industry to embrace consolidation, standardized underwriting, securitization, more consolidation, credit cards, ATMs, broader product offerings, specialized segmentation, data analytics, even more consolidation, and countless other changes. Over the long run, much of it was good, and the industry has improved efficiency and profitability over time.

But somewhere along the way, too many institutions (and too many advisors) came to believe in that seductive fiction that has fooled so many other industries– that customers are easily locked in with real or perceived monopolies, contracts, terms and conditions, EULAs, whatever– and that the path to profitability is to leverage that servitude with a cascade of new (and usually involuntary) revenue streams from the indentured.

Many bankers are truly puzzled by the virulent public reaction to their attempts to defray the costs of delivering deposit accounts. After all, they have cost accounting on their side. It has been a well-known fact amongst bank executives for at least 25 years that most checking accounts are unprofitable in a fully-loaded cost analysis. A similar Pareto Principle has long existed across client cohorts as well– the “vital few” subsidize the “trivial many”.

Why recapturing costs alone doesn’t work:

So why not focus on reducing the unprofitability of a large percentage of your clients? Managing the cost to serve is a very real issue for most firms, and I am a firm believer in the need to focus marketing efforts on clients who have a high probability of being profitable in reasonable amount of time.

What I think most firms and advisors misunderstand is that many clients at every tier actually are willing to pay more– if they receive something of value in exchange. And here’s where it get’s a little tricky– the clients get to decide what provides value and what does not– and not every client will choose the same things.

What does work:

This is where data analytics can really add the most value. Finding clients who will willingly choose to consume additional services for additional cost. (If you do it right, you can add $5 in revenue for every $1 in added cost.)

Firms that really do it right focus their efforts across all of the client segments, not just on reducing unprofitability in the lower tiers. Further improving the profitability of the top 20-25% of your clients can improve their subsidization of the masses and reduce the temptation to annoy the majority of your clients. (Banks and checking accounts may have been the original “freemium” business model.)

Let’s go back to the airlines. The ones thriving, both in customer satisfaction scores and in profitability, are improving the customer experience for all of their clients while they simultaneously raise the bar for their most profitable clientele. Doing only the latter creates ill will that will never be offset by increased profitability for the subsidizers.

You do realize that this is a people business, don’t you?

Open Forum: What is the Disruptive Potential of “mWealth”?

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A recent article in Fast Company magazine (As Smartphones Get Smarter, You May Get Healthier: How mHealth Can Bring Cheaper Health Care To All) described how the technology in today’s smartphones are and could be used in modern healthcare (ultrasounds on the screens, HD cameras for cancer screening, accelerometers to guide physical therapy, microphones as stethoscopes).

It got me thinking…

What is the disruptive potential of mWealth?

…use geolocation to…

…use your HD camera to…

…use existing apps to…

What is the disruptive potential of “mWealth”?

Are You Using Technology to Engage and Collaborate With Your Clients?

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I created this blog to explore the intersection of leadership, advice and technology to improve the lives of financial advisors and their clients. Leadership is a critical element for any organization, and there are many great sources to tap for inspiration and further exploration.

But setting leadership aside for the moment, I have lately found myself thinking more deeply on how technology can enhance the advisor/client relationship– and how rarely it actually does.

In my last post, I reflected on banking as the second oldest profession in the world; and for much of the industry’s history it was not what we would call today a very “scalable platform”. It was a person to person business, and despite much innovation, in many respects it still is. Especially in the high net worth and ultra high net worth space.

Technology has been employed on a very large scale in transaction processing, record-keeping, funds transfer and numerous back office functions for analytics, risk management and compliance. But front office investments in technology have all too often been focused on cutting costs or improving advisor productivity. Good for shareholders, but what about the client experience?

Dodd-Frank and other legislation is quickly pushing compliance spending to the top of the priority list. A 2011 survey by Aite Group and Wall Street & Technology found the 25% of CIOs ranked compliance their top priority– up from 10% in 2010.

As tablets move into the workplace, the traditional advisor/client face to face conversations are moving to more collaborative “shoulder to shoulder” conversations, and many firms and advisors are not prepared for what I believe is truly a seismic shift.

Financial technology firm Balance Financial had a blog post entitled “What Facebook Taught Us About Personal Finance Tech“. The post described some of the challenges advisors and firms face:

Again, personal finance is a naturally collaborative chore.  Even more, professional financial services rely on collaboration.  If you are a financial advisor or CPA, you must interact and engage with your client to deliver services.  You have to get to know your clients, collect information, stay informed of changes to their life and find ways to stay relevant in an ever changing world. 

In the future, look for tools and solutions that use technology to help make the naturally engaging & collaborative process of professional financial services more efficient and rewarding.  The most powerful technology being developed today makes the natural interaction and communication between humans more transparent, more efficient and more frequent. 

I first learned of Balance Financial at Finovate 2011, and I recently had the chance to sit down with Balance CEO Devin Miller to learn more about how his company is using technology to improve the lives of advisors and their clients.

It seems like so much of the recent innovation in the financial industry has been to empower the do it yourself investor and borrower. I think that’s a really good and healthy thing for the industry, but so many clients don’t want to do it all themselves. They want a trusted advisor, but they don’t want to give up the cutting edge technology to get it.

In order to retain and win clients and assets in 2012 and beyond, advisors will need to engage and collaborate more with their clients. Technology can be a great enabler when it’s designed with the right end in mind.

How are you using technology to engage and collaborate with your clients?