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Jay,

A great blog - I said something similar from a product perspective in my own recent blog, Does One Size Fit All ?

The danger facing a Chief Renewals Officer, is that they concentrate on the recurring revenue more than the win-win approach and become the Chief "Cash Cow" officer. Companies then move to a point where they effectively exploit their exisiting customers based on inertia and high exit costs.

At this point the business stops being customer centric and a whole different set of issues arise.

This is great news for shoulder surfers. 

Having driven past this ATM I can report it is inded on a hill on the outisde, but not on the inside of the store. A fine example to show that User Acceptance Testing should include actual users.

One of our clients already runs a central switching service for the United Settlement System (USS) which provides a national ATM switch for Visa & MasterCard Branded cards, as well as a gateway to Union Pay.

The building blocks are already in place.

Plato, the Greek philosopher and author, coined the phrase to describe such a situation,  ‘necessity is the mother of invention’.

Ketharaman,

Both the payments were made when one party was “mobile” – the first I was as the dealers garage, the second was when the locksmith was at my house.

Without the “mobile” element then neither payment would have been as convenient, and other channels devices such as telephone banking or zip-zap machine (remember those) would have been needed. 

This is my definition of “mobile”. 

For the last case – even though the notes were genuine, could I still trust the buyer?

Great report!

From personal experience, it is impossible to buy innovation and agility and any such acquisitions are usually ground down by the weight of corporate culture.

Innovation needs to be embraced as one of a company’s core values in order to thrive. 

But from this blog and previous coverage, it does look as if BBVA are embracing innovation as their way of surviving as a leading bank, rather than merely resting on their laurels and sliding into a managed decline while the new disruptors take away all their best customers. 

Maybe too big to be considered a start-up – but willing to hear the warnings and learn the lessons.

Quick update on trust.

The chap who came to buy my old car brought a brown envelope full of used £20 notes to pay for it. Do I trust him?

PS. This also meant my first visit to a bank btanch for a long time. Thse places are so depressing.

Excellent report Sean.

I agree wholeheartedly your take always, and have described 2 great examples of convienient mobile payments in my own blog today.

For a long time NFC has been a technical solution looking for a problem to solve.

With contactless POS more widely available, and now with HCE overcoming the Telco issues this looks like becoming a more widely available payment method.

As a payment “geek” I am keen for NFC to succeed, but do the consumers feel the same way, and when will we see mass adoption?

Ketharaman,

Thanks for the clarification.

I looked up the post by Ron Shevlin, you cited, but only found the quote below relating to regulation and discriminatory servicing – which I do agree with. 

"Second, the banking industry is highly regulated. Even if a bank wanted to personalize the mortgage application for every individual customer, it can’t. I can just see the headlines where some consumer claims discrimination because their mortgage application process was different from someone else’s." 

However the main point of that post is to degree with the proposition quoted from the white paper Beyond Products and Services in Banking that post discusses:

“Mass customizing a service can be a sure route to staging a positive experience. If you design a service that is so appropriate for each particular person, a service that is exactly what the customer wants and needs at this moment in time, then you cannot help but make him go “Wow!” and turn it into a memorable experience.”

This proposition is more in line with my original article but I was referring to products not services, and there are many successful card programs based on this approach to prove the theory.

The fact that a few enormous banks held back by legacy systems and bureaucracy cannot make this approach work but still survive, shows that dominant  players with deep pockets can rely on inertia and great marketing alone.

In Europe some banks put photographs on the back of cards to help fight fraud. But merchants never checked them, and they have now been superseded by the security of Chip & PIN. The new photocards from Barclays are all about mass personalisation and building the relationship with the cardholder.