You know what …

By on November 29, 2012 in Uncategorized

I think it’s time TBC made a(nother) comeback. See you soon.

Will be pumping out thoughts very soon and in 2013 and beyond.

Keep track of my other project  - Next Bank.

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A pause for The Bank Channel

By on August 1, 2012 in Blogs

You’ll have noticed this year the decline in posts on this blog. There’s a good reason for it – no time! That and a sideways move out of banking means I’m not deep in the trenches in banking anymore. The theories on CX and innovation may be transportable to a new industry, but its time for a new beginning.

This blog now has had 850 posts since it began in February, 2007 as a mere idea and innovation tracking tool for me as I entered a new industry. Since then its certainly become more than that, and has opened my eyes and all sorts of doors across the globe. But now we use differnet ways to get these points across – mostly now in 140 characters! Plus it’s all about a simpler life, not just work. Work like this takes a back seat to family, day job, wine, golf, footy, etc.

To all the people who supported the efforts I made here, a big thanks.

You can find me tooling away at my new idea (amongst others) called Next Bank. Next Bank is an events company as well as a thought leadership and consulting collective that hopes to really shine a light and share with the industry the best and brightest people and ideas. Our first event was Next Bank Asia in May 2012. We have events coming up in Europe & Japan in 2012 and again in Singapore in 2013. If you want to know more, drop me a line via here.

Also you can now follow me on twitter at one of the following handles:
@robfindlay - my own personal views on mostly non-work stuff
@nextbankorg - the umbrella brand for our new Next Bank concept
@nextbankasia - follow this for news on Next Bank Asia events, news and ideas
@nextbankeurope - follow this for new on Next Bank Europe events, news and ideas

Onward to new ideas and adventures!

Cheers,
Rob Findlay

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Innovation Roundup – June 28, 2012

By on June 28, 2012 in Innovation

Global financial services innovation & news

 Other sources of customer experience & focus innovation

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Innovation Roundup – March 19 2012

By on March 19, 2012 in Innovation

Yep they’re back, and hopefully these new (and some old) ideas will inspire you. Twitter is still the best place to go for this stuff.

Global financial services innovation & news

Other sources of customer experience & focus innovation

  • These colorful tents are designed to stand out in their natural setting, whilst also having a little fun doing so. Fancy spending a night in a giant piece of cheese or watermelon, or a circus tent, or under an old quilt?
  • Gerry McGovern makes a good argument about focusing on a users tasks not your content. This uses a website analogy but of course could apply to any channel customers use. (Vimeo video) “Get to the task. They want to get in, they want to get out as quickly as possible”
  • Dollar Shave Club takes a fresh approach to the usually boring – and expensive – subject of mens shaving razors. Building fans before they’ve even sold them a razor! Watch the video (if you have access!)
  • We’ve all heard of Flash Mobs – they’re kind of old now. Next comes Cash Mobs – a group of folks get together and flood a local, independent business, each ready to spend about $20. A nice way to spontaneously support a local business that’s doing good.
  • The Jawbone JAMBOX speaker is a simple speaker linking to a smart phone via Bluetooth but this add shows its multiple functions, simple use and fashionable styling
  • Scrabble Typography Edition anyone? Beautiful.
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The 31 Signs Your Bank Just Doesn’t Get ‘It’

By on February 14, 2012 in Strategy

Watching banks navigate these pretty volatile times in which customers are questioning pretty much every aspect of their financial setup – who they’re with, what they’re holding, how they time markets and movement in banking – has really revealed their true colors to me.

A benefit of only being in the banking industry for 5 years or so is that I can very clearly see the pattern of change from when I started and to now – and I can tell you in the more traditional banking landscape … not much has changed.

But change is going on all around that landscape, and banks need to focus on this.

Now. Today. This week.

They need to be aware of what is happening to customers, innovators, competitors, and technologies, for these forces will determine their futures, not the other way around.

Here are the obvious signs that I read about and see that show many large, old banks are really unaware or unwilling to whats happening:

  1. Your bank’s HQ still in a swanky, marble laden ivory tower in the most expensive street in town – this is deliberately intimidating architectural language designed to engender trust, but really means you have to ask their permission to get your money. Modern new office spaces now concentrate more on quality of light, space and environment, and employee happiness and productivity more than the Georgian era monolithic structures did.
  2. Your bank doesn’t realize its role is as a guardian of customers money as opposed to an entity that holds the purse strings in our lives
  3. Your bank is launching expensive new ‘flagship’ branches, when the numbers of people visiting branches is in decline. Three new branch refurbishments could probably fund the best online banking offering in your banks local market.
  4. Your banks new ‘flagship’ branches are going ahead anyway and look like an Apple store, except not quite as good. (Sorry Citi, but it shows).
  5. Your banks branches are laid out in a dumb, functional way, with poor understanding of customer flow or task, then overlaid with various wasted trickery like coffee machines and book stores. But you’re forced to the branch by archaic documentation and identification requirements, when you’d rather have finished that application or process at home online, or on the phone where you started it.
  6. Your bank is still considering the business case of social media, when the likes of Facebook and Twitter are replacing alternate communication tools – like speaking to each other face to face, or even sending an email
  7. Your bank also bans social media at work, without spending any time to understand how they might leverage it, or at least understand thats how people communicate internally these days (Yammer is awesome!)
  8. You bank doesn’t care that much about the usability and effectiveness of intranets or internal tools, despite these being the platforms that power employees to do their work ALL day, EVERY day.
  9. Your bank is yet to really understand or embrace mobile, when at the same time in growing numbers every person on every train, bus, lounge room couch, desk and cafe table is peering into their phone screen for hours at a time
  10. Your bank still thinks that people who use iPhones, iPads and Android phones are ‘tech-savvy’, when the power of these devices is that they’re ridiculously easy to use, and DON’T need a PHD to use.
  11. Your bank’s internet banking experience is still a dumb transaction history list – no insight, no advice, no appropriate cross sell, no getting ahead financially. IB and more so MB will be the main tool people use to understand, manage and grow their wealth.
  12. Your bank has dozens of home loan, credit card or other such products, when a handful of simpler more suited products would do just fine and actually resonate far more powerfully with customers (the burden of choice can be overwhelming!)
  13. Your bank attempts mass brand campaigns that talk about their connection with you, your heart, your spirit and other such ridiculous claims (only bettered by Telcos – I’m talking about you M1!)
  14. Your bank’s mass brand campaigns are also ‘leading’ the corporate culture, rather than ‘reflecting’ it – this is dangerous. What if you can’t (or never will be able to) do what you claim?
  15. Your bank ‘knows its customers’ so well, it has a really detailed PPT presentation about them! (The Bank has never ‘met’ these customers though)
  16. Your bank doesn’t ask customers what they really need, only what they want. And doesn’t include customers in the creation and implementation of new products and services, holding them close to their chest until launch. This is doomed to failure, or at least consigned to the ‘… meh!’ pile of banking offerings.
  17. Your bank has never mapped an experience end to end to see what a customer really goes through – ‘wow it takes 3 weeks for that document to get processed …” – or has never been a customer – stood in a queue, filled a form, navigated a complex IVR menu. Many times, the leaders of these banks have not been in a branch, call centre or customers place of banking for years (who needs to when you have a dedicated Private Banker??)
  18. Your bank is willing to outsource what a customer would call its core competency – service – whilst those functions that protect shareholder value – audit, risk – are generally internal and protected. Whats that saying about the fermium model? If your not the customer you’re the product. Perhaps to a bank, customers are their products that they make money from, rather than the other way around.
  19. Your bank thinks design is how things look not how things work
  20. Your bank thinks usability isn’t important than face to face service, when probably three quarters of a banking ‘relationship’ is spent dealing with documents, forms, statements, fact sheets, websites, apps, queue ticket machines, interfaces
  21. Your bank still bends you over a barrel with complicated, jargon filled terms and conditions documents, snaring you for fees, charges, sneaky up selling and other tricks – people are tiring of this so quickly
  22. Your bank thinks customers want ALL the functionality when really they only want the core functions, and the rest can hide somewhere else for a while (until I want it , now!)
  23. Your bank doesn’t think a call centre is more important than branches, despite the volume of interactions and their critical customer experience. Call centers matter, hugely. And will be an increasingly important channel IMHO.
  24. Your bank carefully watches the direct competitors for new ideas, launches, products, services etc, when customers think banks are all the same, and desperately hopes Apple, Google or Amazon would open a bank one day to sort it all out. If Richard Branson can’t crack it, then maybe the ghost of Steve Jobs can.
  25. Your bank doesn’t need consultants or outsiders, because your bank knows best. That lacks courage and humility to me.
  26. Your bank makes it hard to switch to or from the bank – the idea of ‘stickiness’ in offering and service reeks of artificial ways to make it hard for a customer to leave the bank. This is only annoying and frustrating, not subtle to the customer or endearing to the bank.
  27. Your bank reveals its true motivations at annual shareholder meetings, without really mentioning customers. But back at the office, the bank is all ‘customer-centric’ again
  28. KPI’s and incentives are still tied solely to revenue, rather than a mix of business and customer success or satisfaction (these are often polar opposites in objective and difficult to balance!). In the one moment the boss creates a culture of focused customer service, then in the next bangs the desk demanding the team makes its revenue targets for the month/quarter/year – how does a team does this at a frontline level constantly across a diverse team and long time period?
  29. Your bank insensitively gives out ‘market rate’ bonuses to high level execs, as if the term PR didn’t exist or wasn’t important
  30. Your bank fails, gets bailed out by governments and tax payers, then makes the same mistakes again, or spends the bailout on the previous point instead of improving customer service, experience and the value proposition
  31. Your bank uses the term ‘this is the way we’ve always done it’ to justify a million pretty stupid decisions

Has any bank cracked all this? No. And I’m not saying every bank sucks. Many banks have cracked many of these items, and done it well through for example product and policy (NAB and its Fair Pricing and Banking), customer experience improvements and functions (DBS, Standard Chartered, and my employer OCBC – I’m biased, because the bank I work for is increasingly getting ‘it’ and are doing good things – I’m sure there are more, please share!) and great channel ideas and executions (CBA, ANZ, most of the Kiwis and Spanish banks, Umpqua etc). What I’m saying is every bank has the potential to be something truly great to its customers (I wouldn’t expect customers to love my bank, just like them), all it takes is the conscious effort to do so.

Does a bank need to do ALL the above? No.But some or most would be good before its too late and disintermediation takes over. The economic crisis I believe has, in a surprising way, lead banks to a sense of security – in times of economic uncertainty there is a flight to quality – deposits into the big banks. Once this uncertainty is over and the global economy is moving again, watch for alternate banking brands and models like Simple, Movenbank, UBank, FRANK, etc to really vault forward, at least in short term experimentation and adoption.

Has any ‘non-bank’ player got all this? No way. I’m amazed for example that no one, no one at all, has really cracked the aggregated PFM space. I don’t know why that’s so hard. But many non-banks may be better positioned to create a new offering that meets all these frustrations above.

What other signs are there?

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Next Bank Asia is coming to Singapore in 2012!

By on October 31, 2011 in Conference, Innovation

Here at TBC HQ (the sofa in my lounge room) its been a little quiet on the blog post front. There’s a reason why. The massive red square to the right in the hint. I’ve taken on a large personal project creating a conference called Next Bank Asia to be held here in Singapore from May 9-10 2012.

Here’s a quick description for you:

Think of the last banking conference you went to. It probably was just like the last one, and the one before that.

Too often, too many banking or financial services conferences are either too corporate, too close-minded or just plain boring.

They don’t include certain fringe players in the industry who can bring new innovative ideas to the table. They don’t include entrepreneurs with new business models for fear of the threat they pose. They don’t connect thought leaders together, or enable the serendipidous coming together of different industries.

Most importantly, these conferences often don’t talk about the reality of the change in front of the industry. The changing consumer, fast evolving technology, increasing uncertainty and volatility at the same time as increasing opportunity are all key environmental factors in any financial services firms roadmap.

Next Bank Asia aims to confront all these issues.

Next Bank Asia will create an open dialogue about all these things, using innovative new formats and agenda items.

We’re looking for designers, technologists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, innovators, governments, policy makers, corporates and banks to come together to discuss new ideas, real futures and how we can collaborate to make banking better for our customers and our businesses.

We already have some globally recognised speakers.

Brett King, Chris Skinner, David McQuillen, Annalie Killian and others are lining up to create a stellar agenda. Be a part of it!

We’re not conference organizers. We’re like you.

We work in the financial services industry like you do. We’re not an events company. So whilst we’re learning about conferences, we know about the issues you confront as well as anyone.

Our motivation here is genuine – we want constructive, challenging, and enjoyable dialogue, not boring speeches formulated by an events company.

We’re going to challenge the conventional conference format too.

An agenda will contain a special VIP event accessing 2 of the brightest brains in global innovation, presentations from thought leaders, demos from entrepreneurs and small businesses, and a huge socially responsible banking section on how the industry is helping (not compromising) the unbanked and developed markets. We’re looking for any interested parties to send us a proposal for their presentation. There’ll also be a cool venue, great food, perfect coffee, cool merchandise and proper conference bags – you know, all that stuff that normally sucks at most conferences.

You create the agenda, not us.

Got any bright ideas? Let us know how you’d like to see Next Bank Asia come together – your participation in constructing the agenda is welcome.

Want to know more?

Visit NextBankAsia.com
Follow @NextBankAsia

Of course always feel free to drop me a note directly or comment via Twitter – lets have some fun here!

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