Community

"...the company has ... struggled to bring the largest insurers and lenders onboard". Along with Apple Pay's failure to enter Canada and Australia, this is the most powerful lesson to finsurgents who previously predicted the death of banks and are now singing the fintech-BFSI partnership tune: BFSI will survive with or without fintech but fintech will die without BFSI.

Sounds impressive but somewhat pales into insignificance when seen against the total value of high value payments handled by Citi, which used to $1T per day at one time and may have gone up even further by now.

This just out:

https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/28504/chinese-banks-charged-half-the-fees-levied-by-apple-pay-on-us-banks

Banks in Canada and Australia have not signed up with Apple Pay. When last heard, they haven't lost any customers.

Apple has been able to sign up banks in China only after waiving fees for 2 years. 

Unfortunately, that means there's no ROI for any of the Top 4 banks to do anything about it. Each of them knows that the other 3 are not much better. Worse still, each of them also knows that customers know that. So, switching is not going to help. In any case, the big customers whom the Top 4 banks somewhat care about are already banking with at least 2-3 of the Top 4 banks. Lest I sound cynical, I've actually sat in on closed door meetings where complaints from corporate customers were discussed and what I've said above more or less matches what I heard SBU heads say.

The only saving grace is that banking is not unique in this disconnect between what it thinks customers want and what customers really want. On my blog, I've written about the same issue in the retail industry. Brick and mortar retailers think people choose ecommerce because of lower price whereas there are so many non price-related reasons - e.g. stockouts - that drive customers to ecommerce.

With exposure to developing and using social media archiving tools, I totally agree about the platform-specific idiosyncracies - Twitter API supplies only the last 2K tweets, LinkedIn stores content only for 1 month, and so on.

In that context, I was wondering how past data is handled by archiving solutions. Will it get archived or will the solution begin archiving only communications that happen from the date of implementation.

Maybe it's only me but shouldn't regulatory arbitrage be accepted - if not welcomed - as a natural consequence of Brexit? After all, elimination of regulatory arbitrage is one of the founding goals of any economic union.

No. Will you share your financial data with your energy utility to help you with your financial management? My bank is not qualified in energy management. Nor would I like it to stray away from its core competence to get into such an area. For help with energy management, I'd anyday go to my energy utility or a third party energy management company - there were 201 of them when I last checked.

"Over time, a company surely will accumulate data that seems irrelevant, but you shouldn’t be so quick to dispose of this data,". From a recent experience of one of my customers, I totally agree. One of their junior staffers was asked to remove duplicate records on their production database. He did a great job of this. Unfortunately, this corrupted the site search engine's indexes with the unintended consequence that the server went down. It took 36 hours of non-stop work to restore the website!

Are you saying an existing Top 4 bank can become the go-to bank for 90% of dissatisfied corporate clients or positing that a new bank can do this?

TY @ShoumitBhattacharya for your comment. I've never been too comfortable with this advice by pundits to sales people to "always be helping" - as though customers are perpetually in need of help and / or are willing to accept help from anyone and everyone. I like your term "facilitating attitude" better. It implies expedition of what customers are already doing. Since virtually everyone I know would appreciate a bit of expedition from anyone, "facilitating" will always work. Bankers have to find ways to make their sales people develop a facilitating attitude, which is the harder part!