Next Bank Asia is coming to Singapore in 2012!

by robfindlay on 31. Oct, 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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Are you creative or a creator?

by robfindlay on 29. Aug, 2011 in future, innovation

When someone asks you to draw a picture of something, or dream up new ideas, or make comment on something some has made, do you respond “I’m not creative, I can’t do that?”

Hearing this from people frustrates me no end. It’s either an unfair judgment of someone’s own abilities – we can all be creative if we let ourselves be – or a copout that that type of work isn’t for us serious corporate adults – its for kids, or art students.

This is of course absurd. We’re all creative in many interesting and colourful ways.

Creativity has been discussed and debated by some of the worlds greatest minds, both in long and recent history. A real revolution in allowing creative thinking and activity is even making its way into the workplace – think colourful and expressive spaces and studios, 20 percent time, etc.

But we need to take it a new level.

We can all be creative, appreciate creative things. We can be artists, dreamers, visionaries.

But to advance ourselves (and our business opportunities) we also need to be creators of creative things – builders, sculptors, entrepreneurs, leaders, directors, project managers, and executors (not executioners).

Be inspired and interesting with your ideas, but make sure you’re also productive and make the idea come alive.

Be creative, and a creator.

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Neatly packaged to takeaway

by robfindlay on 21. Aug, 2011 in video

Whilst these videos made by Sandwich Video are a bit ‘flavour of the month’ for the new online brands like Groupon and Square (my favorite is Jawbone), they do a few things really well IMHO:

  • They’re well produced and look professional (that’s a given right?)
  • They tell stories in plain English (or American, depending on your bias) what the product or service is all about
  • They use real people in situ to explain
  • They show the product or service in action, or demonstrate how it works rather than some complicated diagram or explanation
  • They reveal the real benefit to the user rather than wrapping in corporate justification or jargon
  • They’re short and sweet, to the point

We should use videos like these (and these in my previous post) to explain things to customers, in this simple way.

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Create customer success, not satisfaction

by robfindlay on 16. Aug, 2011 in customer experience, strategy

Reading this BAI article inspired this post. It challenges the internal measures that we use to understand how well our customer experience is performing.

Something I’ve always been critical of is the overly simplistic, lazy and fasle measure that is Customer Satisfaction.

Asking customers how satisfied they are on an 11, 7, 5 whatever point scale is a question they just don’t ever consider.

I’m not even sure about NPS anymore either. The mythical BBQ conversation (somehow an Australian-specific market research analogy) of ‘which bank would you talk to people at BBQs about” is stupid – no one speaks about banks at BBQs, people. They talk about their life, their kids, their jobs, their holidays, not banks, insurance companies, utilities. They might talk about experiences, but not the brands or banks themselves. I don’t think so, anyway – its not something we can keep bringing up in meetings anymore.

Let’s rephrase it simple customer centric terms:

  • How happy are you with the service you receive from the bank?
  • Or perhaps more importantly, are you not unhappy?
  • Did the experience you had meet your expectations? Why or why not?
  • Did you get done what you needed to get done? Do you need to go in again??
  • Are you better off financially being with this bank? Are you making more interest on your savings or saving on your loans and fees?
  • Did the bank make you want to do more business with them?

Ask customers to help you create measures around Customer Success not Customer Satisfaction:

  • TASK COMPLETION – Did the customer complete the task they started?
  • CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS - Did the customer experience meet expectations?
  • WEALTH CREATION - Is the customer creating better financial outcomes for themselves?
  • REPEAT BUSINESS – Is this new business or repeat business?

Don’t get caught up in the miniscule percentages, the 0.3% movement in your customer sat. That’s not real, accurate or something you can lean on as real change.

Concentrate on the real customer outcomes – they got done what they needed to, had an ok time doing it, it benefitted them financially either in the short or long term, and if all goes well, they might come back and give you more business.

Let’s face it, in this current environment, you’ll be grateful for that right?

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The 6 things Nike Plus teaches us about Customer Experience

by robfindlay on 28. Jun, 2011 in customer experience

Some of you may not know that I have a dirty secret. Some of you may know that I’ve decided to join, for a short fleeting moment, a group of people that others find … odd, or perhaps obsessed. I’ve decided, for one bleary eyed Sunday morning, to do a triathlon.

I know what you’re thinking. Lycra, sunglasses, cut to the hilt, chugging Gatorade, doing 100km practice runs, swimming across oceans and riding in volcano fields.

Well, you’d be wrong.

I’m doing the smallest triathlon you can do, so small that I actually wonder if I can wade out to the buoys rather than swim (I really hope so), so small that I fear it’s actually the category 8 year old kids do. You’ll see me crossing the line, then collapsing. Like a winner should.

Still, it’s a target.

And in the spirit of ‘training’ I’ve started using the Nike + app and online training tool. There are many more, possibly better training tools out there, but for me, this will do fine. Fancy graphics and a female voiceover motivates enough, as did the fun of buying new trainers for the little GPS thingy.

Using the system made me think about some of the customer experience lessons this little system taught me – I needed the distraction. Here are the 6 things I can come up with.

Its not about Nike or Apple
No doubt its branded NIKE, and incorporates your ipod or iphone, and that’s part of the reason why you buy it (perhaps the whole reason). But once you use it, it could be made by anyone (who can design a good UI that is) because all of a sudden its you who is driving every aspect – settings, content, data. The tool is merely an empty vessel that you fill with your data. It just works, pretty much out of the pack Adding a GPS transponder in your shoe is simple. Downloading and setting up the app is no worse than the better apps out there. And somehow, I was expecting some sort of link or calibration between the GPS unit and the iPhone, but no. You start a workout on the app, get running, and its captured. Whilst this is a fairly simple function compared to getting a new credit card or internet banking app to work, sometimes we need to keep it this simple.

It connects you to people like you
Yep the standard ‘social’ bit goes in here. But this isn’t the normal application of social that we’re used to. Many social ideas and models rely on the number of participants to correlate with the success of the model – Facebook a good example. But with Nike +, you can have 0 friends, 1 friend or 1000. It doesn’t exactly matter, as long as you go running. Motivation and competition are obvious benefits here. And you can find people who run like you do, as fast as you, near you, or even like the same music.

You set the perameters of success
Everyone has a different idea of what success looks like, what their goals are. So setting your objectives is easy (simple goals like number of kms, time running, etc) and of course can change over time, rather than being locked in. This means your program can respond to how lazy or motivated you are, or towards a specific goal (like a sodding triathlon)

It gets better the more you use it…
The more data you contribute, the more the system might learn about you. Understanding your best or worst times, where you run the best, what time of day, what conditions, what music you’re listening to, what music makes you run faster, all these things can help you create a better ‘athlete’ (use that term loosely folks)

And then Nike creates CRM gold!
Of course NIKE is currently harvesting all that data, and no doubt flogging to the record companies, back to Apple, who sell it back to NIKE and via the iTunes store. Something like that anyway. Again, Apple is creating an ecosystem that connects data, handphones, music, nike apparel, and the lifestyle around all of it.

In the end, it creates good, positive customer behavior
Any piece of gadgetry that captures my data, possibly for unscrupulous reasons (“if it’s free, you’re the product not the customer” someone once said), but gets me out running and getting fitter is fine for me. Means to an end and all that.

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Lift your head up

by robfindlay on 11. May, 2011 in strategy

We all know the SWOT acronym.

For those that don’t, it stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats, a useful framework to review your business’ future.

As you might, I split SWOT into 2 parts.

The internal view. When reviewing strengths and weaknesses, we do an internal review of the business, and work out what we’re good at, versus what we need to improve.

The external view. When reviewing opportunities and threats, we analyse the opportunities we see in a given market or space, as well as the threats other competitors or factors play that may negatively affect us.

As banks, we’re often looking at ourselves to understand our strengths and weaknesses, as well as other banks to see who takes opportunities and creates threats.

However, I feel that as an industry rather than as organisations, we’re great at understanding our strengths and weaknesses, but very poor at understanding our opportunities and threats.

When was the last time you wondered when Bank A was going to open near you, or Bank B was going to launch the same product as you, or you looked at their new website? Probably pretty recently.

But when was the last time you asked, Apple have so much $ in the bank, and outlets like Apple stores, iPhones, iPads and iTunes, that they could start a bank? Or what the combination of Microsoft, Nokia and Skype might mean?

When was the last time you asked whether your local telco is a potential partner or rival? When was the last time you compared the Amazon customer experience to the one your bank provides? When was the last time you pondered if you could tie up with Nike, BMW or Burberry to create something really special?

When did you get to the bottom of exactly how PayPal works, or how Square works, or how Xero works?

Sure, analyse yourself, even analyse other banks. Understand who is doing what. But don’t just match your competitors.

Put your head up a little higher, and you’ll see a vibrant environment of players, competitors, and markets that need your attention.

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