I spent the day visiting with bankers, executives and vendor salespeople at BAI Retail Delivery 2013 – Denver, CO November 5-7. My take away? We are all continuing the transition from static web based information delivery to dynamic mobile content. But not just yet as legacy systems, back office real-time integration and artificial roadblocks by entrenched vendors remain in the way.
Reinforced by the messages delivered Wednesday morning by Keynote Speakers Malcolm Gladwell and Lee Scott: Innovation is typically delivered over a longer period of time than we imagine – and in the retail industry the reason to do something has to come from the outside in. You cannot expect customers to come along unless it truly benefits them; in Fintech it has to benefit both the FI’s and the end users.
As a technology professional I’ve been as guilty of this as anyone – we develop what we think is amazing stuff based on observation, technology influence, what we call market research or just plain personal assumptions. Then guys like me get bankers and information technology consumers excited about the latest bell or whistle. The reality is – most of the time we are off by at least a little – sometimes a lot.
So the incremental end user experience improvements have been great, but not like we see in other industries where there are less conservative and regulated constraints at play. Not just digital banking but in areas like call center support and executive analytics dashboards. There simply haven’t been many examples of breaking traditional processes and operating mechanisms. But there have been these changes outside of the financial services industry. So parallel examples that influence and scary terms like disintermediation from vendors solving problems outside of the traditional payment or banking workflow are starting to change things for us.
At this show I saw influence in three main areas: responsive design, data driven multi-channel solutions and back office, big-data analytics. I’ll talk about how I believe my friends at banks and credit unions need to applying this technology later in this article: Responsive/Adaptive Websites, Dynamic Content, Data Driven-Multi-channel Relationship Management, Making Big-Data Available to FI Users.
For the most part I saw vendors doing what we expect, incremental improvements to traditional online banking. Focused on things like:
- Back Office Interfaces to Core Providers
- Multi-channel User Experience with Mobile, Web, Alerts/SMS, etc
- Mulit-layered security – EMFA
- Analytics and Security
- Integration with ‘Big Data’ – whatever that means to you
- Some sort of widget approach – creating modularization of the user interface
- Third Party Interfaces via SSO – or in some cases integrated via advanced technology like SAML/XML
- Flexible branding – all be it static and limited to templates/parameters
- The endless pursuit of PFM – will it ever really be what customers want?
- A focus on payments – whether its bill pay centric improvements or integrated third party payments/funds transfer/P2P
And of course – the few remaining ‘single platform’ vendors focusing on small business and commercial banking – not relevant here at BAI Retail Delivery but germane to the decision process when you do make a decision to change how you engage with customers. The vendors I’m talking about are:
What I saw that impressed me however were the vendors from overseas, from outside our traditional industry and startups that were taking a different approach. Data Analytics was huge – rows and rows of vendors that were promising to give you a 360 View of your customer. To interpret data that is already there and build dashboards for your executives to make better decisions. To drive marketing and one-to-one contact with your customers. But here is the challenge – so many assume integration is easy, that end users want to have product offers, to know what they are thinking, to anticipate their next product need. The problem – I didn’t see a lot of integration between these vendors and the digital banking vendors. The online banking solutions that were interesting, however, mostly came from vendors that didn’t have the ‘burden’ of a legacy customer base – or entrenched platform. There were a few exceptions but not many, here are a few interesting companies:
And a host of vendors providing analytics, security, etc but I’ll save that for later…
Here are the things that excited me and how I wish we would see integrated, customer focused solutions:
- Responsive/Adaptive Websites and Integrated Mobile Apps
- Dynamic content that integrates the general website with secure, personal financial content.
- Multi-channel relationship management focused customer journeys
- Applied big-data that drives content but also delivers useful administrative user experience
Responsive/Adaptive: The best websites today are the ones you all get your news from, buy products from, count on to deliver an easy to read, use and enjoy. Take a look at Engadget and open it in a full computer web browser. Now resize it to be a narrow column on your desktop. Then open it up on your tablet and on your smart phone. Its not a different system, it’s the same content but optimized for the device you go to. And yes – if you are on an iPhone, for example, it even suggests you download their mobile App – but you don’t have to, it works. If you login to this site, my site Allazo.com or even my personal website Charanis.com – it is responsive, with a different menu and user experience optimized for your platform. I use WordPress a blogging platform that is so powerful yet incredibly simple: Online banking has to do this.
Dynamic: The user experience also has to be all-inclusive. There is nothing more frustrating to an end user than looking at a bank website to learn about rates, products, bank contacts, information then having it all disappear when they login to online banking. And even worse to not have any of that information available to you on an iPhone because the vendor takes over the experience to drive a bare bones WAP like experience. We did this at Intuit – it was easer to implement and manage but its not optimal and needs to change. Sure – you could pick “go to full site” but then you typically got a shrunken web page not responsive at all – and why does the customer need to do that; its not a fun end user experience. There have been discussions of bringing all together but few have gone down that path, other than these new vendors breaking new ground. A true multi-level user access experience has to be implemented. Integrating balances into the general website once a user logs in with basic authentication, then allowing for transactions after further multi-factor authentication.
Then going the extra mile – with a different experience based on where the user came from, what products they have, who they are; both public and behind the login. The content needs to be delivered across all channels – with actionable alerts that link to the website or mobile apps. Big data today is all FI focused – creating advertisements, offers and canned messages. What needs to happen is a shift to the customer’s view – think about more than just the online channel – but how we can recreate the feeling a customer has when they talk to a competent banker.
Map to the Customer Journey: We need to deliver more than co-browse or online chat. We need back office and call center integrated video and online chat, customized email and social media integration that delivers the kind of warmth and competence today’s customers expect from the digital channels. Big data and social media integration is only as good as the way it delivers on the promise of better relationship management.
If you want to talk more about this please give me a call – I look forward to learning from you and having a spirited conversation about your interpretation of the opportunities that lie ahead!
Jim Charanis