I know, I just mixed a metaphor – and I used a simile for a branch acting like a person. Grammar be damned – the things bankers are doing these days with mobile in the branch just make me think of this ugly bionic man with all kinds of weird contraptions hanging off of him.
I’ve spent most of my career helping bankers think differently about self service, or rethinking connected strategy. And I’m going way back – even in 1989 when I started in commercial online banking (we called it cash management back then) the biggest challenge was always convincing a banker to abandon what worked really well today for something they couldn’t envision working better tomorrow. I remember in 1995 talking to a banker about shifting from a distributed PC dial up and sync solution to an internet based online commercial banking solution and her looking at me like I was trying to convince her that the phone in her car would one-day fit in her pocket.
So today – we need to stop trying to hang tablets off of ATM’s; and stop developing our mobile banking applications in silos. We can’t consider a teller application running on a Microsoft Surface as a mobile banker solution; and we can’t consider dropping Salesforce.com CRM in the branch as a complete sales platform. It’s time to kill the cyborg branch and rebuild the business that customers still walk into.
The industry is transforming and needs to continue to shift from application specific solutions to a more consolidated approach to delivering multi-channel solutions. I expect all of this to change in the coming years.