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!

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.

“How I now graphically represent my incomings and outgoings”

Photo – Incase, Flickr

Wow there’s a lot of excitement out there in bank land about Personal Financial Management tools, or PFM as they’re shortened to. The interactive, visual tools you can use to see your financial situation in internet or mobile banking.

Pioneered by software companies since the 80s, executed beautifully as we know by Mint.com and others, now there is a wave of banks that are all clamoring to create the best user interface for their customers and their data.

And if the banks are keen on this, there are as many non-banks and 3^rd parties that offer similar services and more – everything from sorting a shoebox of receipts, to running your small business, to comparing you to rest of the country and their own spending habits.

You’ll soon be able to gaze deeply into the drowning sea of debt in which you paddle, in vibrant, pretty colours.

It’s a great development, because for the majority of consumers, they’d spend the past 2000 years living within the banking construct of the ledger – a matrix showing a list of inputs and outgoings, that makes sense when tallying information, rather than interpreting it.

Now they’ll have pie charts, bar graphs, line charts and other mathematical diagrams that will really cut through their financial situation to reveal the reality. It will enable them to understand their position better and then importantly make better decisions (regardless of whether they’re cross sell related or not).

It seems by the end of 2011 every bank worth its salt, IT environment providing, will have a PFM solution for its customers to play with.

What happens after that? What will be the key development following PFM?

I’m not sure many banks have looked into it. Perhaps they don’t need to, or want to.  

Lets take a look at what a PFM maturity road-map might look like.

• Phase 1 – Internet banking moves from a simple transaction history experience to something the same information in a more tasty graphical form
• Phase 2 – Internet banking, as well as the mobile/app experience, becomes fully visual
• Phase 3 – The interface becomes fully customizable, with content able to be hidden or shown as required
• Phase 4 – The content served either as part of a customers data, or dynamically by the banks CRM systems, is regarded as value add rather than advertising – even though it creates sales like crazy
• Phase 5 – the same interface and information is used by bank employees to leverage sales and service conversations

What are the pitfalls of creating PFM tools?

• Everyone is doing it, so it better be awesome
• Every bank normally makes things complicated, so keep it simple
• Every bank takes forever, whereas Google and Apple get this stuff done relatively quickly – so get moving
• Don’t just start with internet banking, start with the mobile too. And ATM. And on paper stuff.
• In fact, don’t start with the banks channels, start with the customer and how they’ll use these tools

As for what’s beyond PFM, well some customers would say not much more.

But the next thing may involve the way you interact personally with this data, the way it integrates into the other parts of your life (home, work, car, mobile), the way companies use this data (don’t do a Facebook and sell that CRM gold!).

Either way, it will change the way we look at and understand money forever.

The power of good UX is always used for good, not evil.

‘The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.’

Rupert Murdoch made this comment in February 2008 about the future of the newspaper business.

This view of the future applies to all industries, particularly those with large and small players, with old and new organisations, and with the threat of disintermediation and business model disruption on the immediate horizon.

The newspaper business is currently feeling this pain; travel and real estate are facing irrevocable change within their industries; and banking will be next.

Innovation is one of the ways we can counter or even capitalise on this event horizon.

How customers manage their money

A customer might log on via the internet to: view their account balances; make payments and transfer funds via an iPhone app; pay a friend back for a lunch debt by bumping phones together; or find an ATM on the way to lunch using augmented reality; then video chat to a call centre agent via Skye regarding their financial advice needs; or discuss these needs in person with a retail representative using a collaborative touch screen table; and share this information later with friends that have similar needs.

All of this can be done today using existing online and digital technology. And not one of these tasks needs to be facilitated by a traditional bank brand as we know it. A collection of offerings from brands such as Mint.com, Apple iPhone, Skype, Facebook and PayPal can replicate the banking function, and even the relationship, as we used to know it. This is part of the new future that large financial services organisations must prepare for.

A perfect storm has emerged …

So why is this upon us? And what is happening that is making this change occur at such breadth and pace? A perfect storm has formed on a range of fronts:

• Economic conditions were drastically shunted. In a post-GFC economic environment, business models have been stretched and tested. While Australia’s banks and financial institutions have fared relatively well through the global financial crisis, the Australian market has not been totally unaffected, and pressures on wholesale funding remain an ongoing issue.
• Consumer behaviour changed irrevocably. After 10 to 15 years of economic prosperity, consumers have become far more comfortable with certain kinds of debt instruments and they are now able to make purchase and service decisions much quicker, and with greater knowledge and understanding.
• Technology capability embedded itself in our lives. Information technology is ubiquitous, with people’s lives seemingly busier than ever amidst the promise and presence of technology designed to make life simpler and more efficient.
• Changing business models now compete alongside traditional models. This new access to consumption and technology has created new industries and supply chains that deliver products and services to consumers.
  … with lasting consequences
• Trust and security are now highly valued. Large banks and financial services have some advantages here, but they need to convince customers through actions rather than words.
• Customers have greater access to products/services and more knowledgeable about their options.
• Control of the conversation is now shared between the consumer and the organisation. Consumers can now have conversations with other consumers more easily than with large corporations like banks.
• The preferred channel for certain tasks is becoming clearer, with online and digital channels widely preferred for simpler tasks, and face-to-face or voice-to-voice channels preferred for more complex tasks, such as sales conversations or problem resolution.
• Digital interfaces are evolving from a graphical user interface (GUI) (click a link using a mouse on a PC browser) to a natural user interface (NUI) (touch a button using your finger or hands on a mobile device).
• The proliferation of offerings from hardware and software providers such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Nokia means we must evolve digital interactions from website development to multiple platform display and support.
• Peer-to-peer lending as provided by brands like Zopa means anyone can provide the financial offering of a bank.
• Disintermediation is a reality unless a strong focus on customer centric servicing and adoption of new technologies is established.

Incremental innovation must be accompanied by seismic shifts

There are essentially three key components of creating an innovation response to the new paradigm:

• establish an innovation culture and process;
• create strategic innovation awareness and change; and
• move fast on the tactical dimensions of online innovation.

Rather than a scatter gun or an ad hoc approach to innovation, an innovation culture needs to be created.

In this environment: people become aware of and open to the idea of lateral thinking; a flow of innovative thinking, ideas and practices is generated; processes are developed to enable this flow of ideas to flourish until they are proven; and a method of measurement will be required to analyse the quality, performance and ultimately the return on investment associated with new ideas.

In his excellent book Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, James Gardner, former head of innovation at Lloyd’s TSB, describes five strategic dimensions of business innovation, each with varying levels of potential disruption:

• new business models (PayPal can be described as a disruptive model, Zopa even more so);
• new channel capabilities (mobile is the predicted boom area);
• new markets (e.g. gen Y and the emerging markets in Asia);
• new experiences (better processes such as a mortgage application process); and
• new product forms or evolutions (the credit card was perhaps the last real product innovation).

These are the dimensions in which innovation can enable your business to make a seismic shift towards the future, or be obliterated by an unforeseen threat.

On a smaller level, for those digital and online channel managers under the channel strategic dimension, there are tactical online innovations that can be made. Current trends in this space include mobile and wireless ideas, security and biometric innovation, user-generated content and social media, the simplification and improvement of the user interface, and the massive area of micro, contactless and other payments innovations.

Regardless of your approach, simply keeping your hand on the rudder and steering forward in a straight line may not give you the edge against competitors. The level of innovation that your business needs to stay ahead of the competition may be something as small as a specific channel idea, or an entire business model change.

But, standing still is not an option.

Sidebar content:

10 insights on digital innovation in financial services

• Digital technology is already here.
• Digital is the ultimate scalable environment.
• Mobile services will boom in all forms.
• The role of physical outlets will not diminish, but will change forever.
• A multi-channel mix is unavoidable.
• Your brand needs to be anywhere, anytime on any device.
• The power is in the cross-integration.
• Good user experience and design are critical differentiators.
• Customers are more in control now than ever – don’t waste that opportunity.
• It’s not just about online and social networks, it’s about digital connections and relationships.

Quick thanks: To Brett King for opening this part of my brain. Buy his book!

1. The Dreamer
You’ll need to think of quite illiogical possibilities, of seemingly odd pairings of ideas, of ideallic future states for the business that will require drastic transformation, yet seem impossible to ignore or aim for. You’ll need to articulate these visions in ways that non-change agents can understand, and sell the future, and the first step towards it.

2. The Strategist
You’ll need to formulate a way to get the right movement forward to align with the objectives of interested parties – like management, shareholders, etc. You’ll need to create both incremental change that adds to a large amount, or introduce ground breaking change that is too compelling to ignore.

3. The Agitator
You’ll need to be prepared to take a different view to those in the room, to put the mirror of the real world up to the face of the business, and show whats really going on. You’ll need to bring some harsh and simple reality to the table, and fight to get this heard. This may not prove popular. But not many change agents are, and rarely survive long.

4. The Networker
You’ll need a strong network across the business to simply survive, let alone thrive. But you’ll also need to use the network to get some of the less formal or traditional initiatives potentially happen. A seemingly random collection of people from across a business, sometimes called a multi-functional team, can achieve odd results when doing things ‘under the radar’

5. The Connector
You’ll be in a rare position that your new network will make you vital in creating connections across the business. When you hear about project A relates to topic Z, and so does project B, you connect the people together and become a key link in reducing double up in the business.

6. The Influencer
You’ll realise that agitation doesn’t always work, but given its your natural instinct to do so, its hard to play the game. Influencing others to make a positive change of direction will become a skill you’ll need to garner funds, resources, approval, etc.

7. The Designer
You’ll need to appreciate the finer craft of delivery, and of customer and user experience, as this will prove the difference in uptake in your ideas. A new idea packaged in a better way than others can manage means a better chance of success – just ask Apple about their iPod.

8. The Journalist
You’ll need the curiosity of the journalist – about every topic, in every field, in any time – as others will throw all manner of logic to rebutt your ideas. You’ll also find that this wide understanding of the world feeds your creative mind, and creates left-field thinking. And just like a journalist you’ll need excellent communication and writing skills!

9. The Project Manager
You’ll need to be very organised to get ideas flowing through, and people in line to assist you. You’ll need to show the business that you can create structure where they thought structure couldn’t exist.

10. The Deliver-er-er
You’ll need to produce the goods, deliver to market, and create customer response. This can take time, often means short term flame and pain, but in the long term must align to a change strategy.

The business requirement documents are always there.

But I’ve found a new way to get excited. It’s a way that cuts through the red tape, communicates clearly to all types of stakeholders, and builds business requirements on the fly.

Its of course the working prototype. A small interactive demo of your idea. That shows people how it can work.

It might be a small mobile app, or a process workflow, or a before and after of a call centre agent interaction. It might be a designed brochure, or a credit card mockup, or a branch design.

It might cost $5k, or $10k or even $50k. But I guarantee it will get pay back.

Start small, build a small prototype, prove it can be done, then build up from there.

When you’re creating something truly innovative, thats not just some fun mashup or app idea, that truly creates some business and industry impact, can you allocate to one of 3 in each of the 5 lines in the above diagram?

Lets explore each row.

WHAT WE CREATE

We can … Create New Products
Innovation can deliver entirely new products that break the mould, that disrupt the market. The product may be a combination of existing product concepts (think packages or bundles) or a flip on an existing paradigm (think ANZ’s credit card that rewards you as you pay it off) 

We can … Better Distribute & Service Products
Channel innovation is an obvious space of activity at the moment. With mobile and touchscreen interfaces becoming prolific, almost ubiquitous this year, channel and distribution will be critical to get right. Front end and back of house development and innovation will create speed to market, and better customer experience.

We can … Have Customer Conversations
Again, a busy space, with the obvious reference to social media here. How can we have genuine conversations with customers that build trust, create return activity from the bank and break down the
barriers?

THE WAY WE CREATE IT

By … Enhancing The Old Using New Ways
Looking at old fashioned problems, challenges or previously missed opportunities (like Straight Through Processing, or – related – document fulfilment; or multi-channel integration) using new approaches, technologies, and even other industries can create a fresh way to solve an old problem.

By … Creating The New Using Old Ways
This is an area to focus on emerging customer experiences and business opportunities that can be fit into your existing business model and value proposition. It may be something as specific as a web interface and process, or something as general as a new regulatory imposed approach to security.

By … Creating The New Using New Ways
This is the real cutting edge area, that may take some not so Business As Usual activity (skunkworks its sometimes called round our way). The key here is to find a way – any way! – to keep up with the evolving and changing speed of customer expectations, and the other brands that serve them. Try using a new technology like Augmented Reality, or touchscreen technology, to create a prototype or proof of concept.

HOW WE COMMUNICATE IT

Creating a … (Proof Of) Concept
This can simply be a one pager, or even a simple screen wireframe, product description, customer experience interaction map, business benefit analysis. But get the idea on paper, and add it to a list to be analysed, assessed and considered for further work.

Creating a … Working Prototype
This can be a working technical execution based on dummy data. Or a physical product mockup. Or a recording of a proposed service interaction (thats right – get ready for role play). But nothing shows the benefit of a concept than when its in action, particularly if its showing a before (ie. its currently pretty bad huh?) and after (ie. if we fix it the way I want, it will be this good!)

Creating a … Ready To Launch Product With Business Case
So you feel the opportunity is strong and have some support. Take it all the way and package it up ready to make a decision so it can be in market … next week! Now, just to get that decision …

MAKING A BUSINESS DECISION

Forcing a … Decision To Stop
Your superiors or supporters will need to make a decision. If you’ve presented a compelling concept paper, prototype or even full business case, then a decision is an informed one. A decision to stop may be the best thing in the long run.

Forcing a … Decision To Explore Further
Exploring further means there’s potential. So take the opportunity to progress a concept to a prototype, or a prototype to full business case.

Forcing a … Decision To Proceed
Wow you’ve made a great case and … holy crap! Its going ahead. Fantastic. Now the hard work starts!

THE BENEFITS WE CREATE

Resulting in … Increased Revenue
These benefits will be critical. Showing these benefits upfront will do you a lot of good and increase your chances of the idea progressing and indeed, surviving. A benefit like increasing revenue and sales is an obvious one…

Resulting in … Decreased Cost
… but probably not as crucial as cutting costs. Innovation can often be confused with process improvement – please don’t make every idea one of these, otherwise your staff, and indeed your people, will die of boredom.

Resulting in … Increased Customer Satisfaction
Making customers happier is indeed a soft benefit, but it has some clear business benefit, and anyway it creates some karma. We all need that.

Give it a try and let me know your results.