How to Become Your Customers' Everyday Bank

Banks have a unique opportunity to capitalize on the vast amounts of customer insight they hold to go beyond simply facilitating payments. They can reinvent themselves as an Everyday Bank, helping customers reach decisions about what to buy, when and where to purchase, and even helping to negotiate the best deals in a ubiquitous format.

Non-banks are capturing more and more of the banking value chain, providing services such as payments, checking and even savings accounts that could erode as much as one-third of traditional bank revenues by 2020 according to Accenture. These new entrants pose a threat to banks by raising service expectations and coming between banks and their customers.

According to a new report from Accenture, entitled "The Everyday Bank," the response is not just about closing branches, improving online and mobile banking offerings or making current products and services "more digital." Instead, banks need to move further into the daily lives of customers, providing assistance before, during and after the financial transaction.

Customer behaviors and expectations are quickly adjusting to a world where products and services are recommended based on past behaviors and where location-based offers are provided instantaneously on their mobile device. Customers want information to be fingertip-ready. 

The Everyday Bank

According to Accenture, an Everyday Bank leverages the vast amount of insight it possesses to become central to a customer's financial and non-financial digital ecosystem. The Everyday Bank reinvents itself as a value aggregator, advice provider and access facilitator, acting proactively on the customer's behalf, improving reputation and trust. 

An Everyday Bank drives continuous daily interaction by building partnerships and connections with provider partners who offer goods and services in every area of area of consumption, including retail, home services, health and security, travel and leisure, communication and transportation. By tapping its wealth of transactional data, without ever sharing analytic information outside of its four walls, the bank reaches out to the right third-party providers and other key players to build a digital customer experience combining mobile, big data, analytics, digital marketing coupling, ticketing capabilities (at ATMs?) and more.

The Everyday Bank uses its digital engine to automate front- and back-office processes to optimize for speed, efficiency and scalability. According to Accenture, a highly functioning Everyday Bank can:

• Slash back-office effort by as much as 80 percent
• Reduce its managed applications portfolio by 70 percent
• Cut time to market by 40-50 percent
• Increase operating income by 25-30 percent

In a real-life example, an Everyday Bank has the rich customer data to know when a customer may want to purchase a car (based on the age of current vehicle, family structure, etc.). After offering the customer assistance if they agree that a car purchase is in order, the bank can recommend vehicle models that might fit their lifestyle, personal preferences and budget. 

Next, because the bank is in a position to negotiate thousands of car deals on behalf of their customers, they can get a price that meets both the customer's and dealers needs. After bundling in insurance and any other after-market products, the bank then recommends a payment plan that is best for the customer.

According to Accenture, the five critical elements of an Everyday Bank include:

1. Provides services that are digitally optimized across a variety of platforms
2. An omnichannel approach
3. Uses big data and predictive analytics to help anticipate customer financial and non-financial needs
4. Offers a human touch for high value interactions
5. Is attuned to their customers' moments of truth

The Everyday Bank also brings pricing transparency, trusted advice, social recommendations and transactions - as easy as one click.

Bank Innovation Through Collaboration

INNOVATION 

Established by two former bankers, the Bank Innovators Council was developed to help financial institutions that may lack internal resources come together to brainstorm and test new ideas that could eventually be shared. Partnerships with Finovate, NextBank, BankersHub and Innovation Agency will hopefully provide additional momentum. 

By JP Nicols^®, founder and CEO of the research and innovation firm Clientific, a partner at Bank Solutions Group and co-founder of the Bank Innovators Council.

Bankers and credit union executives have long sought a competitive advantage in a vast sea of largely undifferentiated competitors. For most players, and for most of the industry’s long history, the chief weapons in this war have been scale and localization. Either growing large enough to create economies of scale and/or scope, or trying to corner one or more local markets by being more, well, “local”. A few have even tried to accomplish both strategies simultaneously.


But how will those strategies play out in this new era of financial services? Regulators will not let the very biggest banks get a whole lot bigger any time soon. The top 100 banks in the U.S.— less than 1.5% of the 7,000 or so still around— already control 81% of the loans and 75% of the deposits. Well-capitalized and well-run small and midsize banks and credit unions will certainly swallow up weaker competitors as this quickening consolidation phase that we have all been predicting inevitably becomes a reality sooner or later. But will this truly create any new competitive advantages beyond survival of the (relatively) fittest?

How about the localization strategy of being 'the bank or credit union of '? Let’s set aside the fact that most organizations that proclaimed to be the bank of XYZ were probably not really the bank or credit union of anything outside of their own imagination. In this hyper-connected, hyper-globalized world, being merely local is meaningful to only a steadily dwindled segment of consumers. 

Sure, there are kernels of truth to each of these strategies. Having the scale to spread out increasing infrastructure costs is important, up to a point. And I chose the words 'merely local' for a reason. I think the real word the localists are looking for is 'relevant'. Being headquartered in my hometown is fine, I guess. More jobs for the local economy. But as a customer, what I really want is for you to be relevant to me — and many of the behaviors of the banking behemoths did little to make me feel that way.

Why It’s Different Now

Those basic strategies worked well enough for the last few hundred years, but until recently, the industry was basically undefeated because it won all of its games by default. Sure, we had large banks and small banks, and credit unions, and for a time, S&Ls and Savings Banks; but these were all just slightly different flavors of the same basic model.

Banking as a product and as a service had no real threat of substitution. But during just the last 5 to 10 years, the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, broadband connectivity and connected networks of all kinds have changed the nature of the game. Forever. Just as radio and movie theaters were disrupted by television, which was disrupted by videotapes, which were disrupted by DVDs, which were disrupted by streaming video, the disruption in banking has only just begun.


You can now live your entire financial life off the grid of traditional financial institutions — at least in your direct interactions. They still play a role behind the scenes, but the nameless, faceless utility that merely holds your insured deposits and ensures an efficient transfer of your funds from Point A to Point B is the very definition of a commodity trap.

Customer Experience Innovation in Financial Services

INNOVATION

Expectations from today's consumer are outpacing the ability for banks and credit unions to keep up. The digital consumer is hyper-connected, highly informed and demands a highly personalized approach with regards to communication, product development and customer service.

On January 13, 2014, I was the featured guest for a global Twitter chat hosted by @IBMbigdata entitled, "Customer Experience Innovation in Banking". During the hour, there were 158 participants, 1,095 posts and over 6M impressions!

Below is a sampling of the interchange (including my responses)

More than half #bank customers’ interactions on avg took place through online or mobile channels ~ @BainAlerts so Q1 >> #CXO
— IBM big data (@IBMbigdata) January 13, 2014

Q1: How does today's customer behavior and expectations in a constantly changing technological world impact banks?

A1: Customer 3.0 banking expectations based on verticals like retail. Wants mobile money mgt. not just access to accounts. #CXO

— Jim Marous (@JimMarous) January 13, 2014

We’re in age where customers are armed w/ info & dictate service – 2 them service w/o instant = lacking A1 #cxo #banking

— Natasha Bishop (@Natasha_D_G) January 13, 2014

A1: Like Netflix and Amazon, bank consumers want their needs anticipated. #bigdata #banking #CXO

— Bob Palmer (@bigdatabusiness) January 13, 2014

A1: Biggest challenge for traditional banks is . . . tradition. Legacy systems, processes and mindsets #CXO
— Jim Marous (@JimMarous) January 13, 2014

A1: #CXO Customers expect online commerce--facilitated by e-banking--to become core of all transactions.
— jameskobielus (@jameskobielus) January 13, 2014

Not only seamless online transactions but also seamless online SECURITY. #cxo A1
— Lois Martin (@LoisMarketing) January 13, 2014

It's Time to Reinvent Mobile Banking

MOBILE STRATEGIES

It's time to shut down the mobile banking operations at most banks. I say this after watching the development of mobile banking sites worldwide and realizing that most traditional banks don't understand the needs of the consumers they serve or the competition they face.

Mobile banking should not be a delivery channel for branch-based banking. It should be a contextual experience, with a clean design, simple interface and engaging platform to manage money. Unfortunately, most mobile banking sites look like miniaturized online banking websites. This is a problem as we try to serve Customer 3.0.

Last week, AXA Banque in France launched a new 'mobile-first' offering called Soon (website translated to English). Similar to other pure-play mobile banks worldwide like Moven, Simple, GoBank, Fidor, Hello, etc., Soon was initially introduced using a registration/invite model to allow for orderly scalability. Not a bank as such, Soon is a set of services accessible via a mobile application and backed by AXA Bank.

In an exclusive interview with Raphaël Krivine, head of direct banking for AXA Banque, "We started to engage with users in mid-2013, presenting the concept of the offer and the main functionalities to get feedback and comments (especially via our introduction video). It was very useful for us to validate the overall concept and to finalize developments in the right direction." He continued, "The offer is now available for the people who registered last year as a way to thank them for having been supportive from the very beginning.

Unlike virtually all traditional mobile banking sites, Soon (and the neo-banks mentioned above) rethinks the way mobile banking is done by designing a bank for the smartphone as opposed to simply providing access to banking products through a mobile device. This was done at AXA by creating an entirely different brand and mobile platform within the bank. This allowed for an alternative digital infrastructure, a lean start-up mode, open architecture and the ability to view banking from the customer's (as opposed to the bank's) perspective.

With a significantly lower cost structure, the emergence of pure-play mobile banks feels like a similar trend in the 1990s when direct online banks were in vogue. Some of these banks still exist such as First Direct and ING overseas and Capital One 360 (originally ING Direct US), USAA, Ally and Discover Bank in the U.S.

While many traditional banks have imitated some of the direct bank advantages, deposits at the top four direct banks have grown at three times the industry average according to TNS Global. Interestingly, while once having a pricing advantage compared to traditional banks, consumers also rate these direct organizations as 'more convenient' than traditional bricks and mortar banks.

The question is, will traditional banks ever fully embrace the process of managing money through mobile as opposed to simply providing mobile access to accounts? Will they lose the 'convenience advantage' with the mobile channel also?