We're witnessing the fastest ever shift in banking

Pulling out old quotes is a bit mean, Brett. We all say silly things sometimes. Remember this gem from 2011: "Banks beware - if by July this year you are still issuing plastic cards, or still opening checking accounts - you are about to be in a world of hurt!"

Imagine my surprise upon seeing this tweet last week. 

Matt,

Nice try...

Nothing has changed except that Moven has given plastic as an option for early beta customers (as previously reported in Finextra this is not something we wanted to do by choice) and we still lead with mobile and contactless. If you've seen our packaging for clients you'll see we are still totally mobile focused. Nothing new here for Moven or our customers. Certainly no change in our game plan or our vision.

I think you'll find since 09' I've been absolutely consistent on mobile's role in shifting consumer behavior and have never backpeddled on that. I also think my record on predicting the magnitude of change has been pretty consistently strong (e.g 2009-11 branch view versus more recent trending data showing actual shift).

BK

Brett, how easy do you think it will be for the large banks to manipulate their systems to respond to this innovation?

Secondly, what do you see as the big constraints and barriers to entry or growth for smaller innovators? (Regulatory requirements? Capital requirements? Compliance and risk constraints?)

Nice article.

Yet again Santayana's assertion "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is validated. Do we humans have a blind spot when it comes to technology that we repeatedly, despite all evidence, say that new technologies will never replace the old?

To paraphrase the article's title, "We're witnessing the fastest ever shift in everything"

Brett,

Don’t get me wrong - I think what you guys are doing at Moven is great – but I do feel there is a lot of noise in general about multi-channel delivery, mobile, and some very nice, value added features such as Safe to Spend, blended with some innovative PFM type services etc. that are all clearly significant improvements over traditional offerings.

However, the key focus of most activity is restricted to what could be considered relatively traditional “transactional services”, and little in the area of true product offering innovation, and as you call it - "solving your financial problem". That can't really be done if we continue to insist on a one size fits all approach.

I guess that most of this is driven by the fact that nobody to date has actually taken a green field or virgin bank and built a new bank from the ground up with this capability, and instead what I see is that most if not all of the innovators out there like Moven are having to piggy back off traditional banks with traditional core systems and traditional product restrictions.

Even banks running on “newer” core systems that purport to have a “product factory” capability are really not there, as their supposed product factory is a misnomer to say the least. It does not allow new products to be built on the fly – at all. Instead these factory capabilities only allow banks to adjust the characteristics of pre-built and pre-defined baseline products. They can create new offerings – not new products.

This is something we have detected a while back and the reason we decided to break away from the traditional product catalogue approach of existing core systems and modules, and instead allow for a true product builder that does not require multi-million dollar investments and time to provide customers with new offerings, and in fact does not require new coding at all for new product ideas.

The idea is that by then marrying this same capability to a compelling user experience with choices, we can ensure that consumers are able to fully interact with offerings, obtain a greater degree of understanding of the solution being offered – which in turn translates into a much higher degree of confidence and trust… more sales… and better sales.

This will then finally resolve the problem reported recently where it was identified that a higher percentage of Gen Y consumers go to branches to open accounts, because the current user experience doesn’t allow them to feel comfortable or to feel they truly understand what is being offered.

It will also allow us all to get away from the pure rate shopping experience that continues to exist, no matter how great a service you offer.