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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.

I agree about CYA fine print that we don't read.

Your experiment with multiple sessions is interesting.

I wonder if Bank of the West customers who also use services like Mint, or Yodlee, etc. for their PFM and data aggregation services are suddenly going to find that their service starts to fail because it cannot connect... since their phone is permanently connected

:-)

The comments about baseline regulatory and fundamental security considerations to me make total sense.

Customers presumably should sign / confirm some form of basic disclaimer accepting the risks of using this type of feature with no timeout etc. - I'd like to see what type of disclaimer is being used, because there theoretically should be a very clear and transparent notification of all potential risks if the bank wishes to protect itself.

This idea of disclaimers and potential litigation in the US reminds me of the pharmaceutical advertisements in the US - which are culturally so different to say European countries. In the US, the advertisement will often spend 15 seconds talking about the product, and another 20 seconds about all of the possible side effects - enough to scare you to death about the product...!

As for Two Factor Autentication - it is absolutely true and mind boggling that US banks still have close to zero adoption of this simple concept that can be very easily implemented through multiple mechanisms and alternatives - despite regulatory insistence around the same.

However, the examples of MINT and others as people who benefit from the lack of 2FA are I believe flawed. These service providers do not need - and to my mind should not need - 2FA to pull simple inquiry type data for their analytics. A user ID and password should be sufficient, and assumes their custodianship of this information is supposed to be bullet proof.

2FA instead is something that should be used to confirm a financial transaction, or change of account / customer details etc.

I couldn't agree more.

Banks, particularly in the US, often cite the incredibly high amount of fraud and losses they suffer with cards and online transactions.

Yet, having worked with a number of US banks I continue to be amazed at how few have any sort of simple two factor authentication on transaction execution - even a simple coordinates card etc.

Many new payment and channel features are being driven by the argument that customers want "convenience", particularly younger generation segments.

This then becomes a guiding rule in design. If it's not quick and easy and convenient, it's not good.

Which of course means - small print... and often little or no basic security or protection.

I think we would all agree with basic philosophy of what you propose in terms of addressing specific customer needs and allowing customers to be “valued as individuals”.

But the example you give is not really achieving this, as your example is really generating another “off the shelf”, take it or leave it, product flavor – not a customer specific solution. Taken to an extreme, this would simply lead us to a situation of made to measure products per customer, something that is neither efficient nor truly viable with existing core systems and operations.

What’s really needed is the ability to create a single product offering template that can then be dynamically and intuitively personalized to the needs of each customer. Let the customers themselves interact via any channel and dynamically adjust the characteristics of the template product at the point of sale to the specific needs, preferences and profile of each individual.

In the case of saving and investment products, this would be relatively “normal” in a HNW / Private Banking environment, but if we want to take this into a Retail mass distribution environment, a different type of solution is needed.

Imagine each customer adjusting a product’s characteristics to trade off guaranteed minimum interest rate, planned liquidity, market participation, and even potential capital at risk – all with interactive and dynamic re-pricing.

Achieving this in a way that does not impact the bank’s operations, that allows multiple product flavors, yet can be managed as a single product offering and single hedging transaction is the secret to true customer specific, segment of one capabilities. And this is something that traditional core systems cannot manage given their architecture built around the concept of a product catalogue. We therefore need to compliment and extend the current core system capabilities before being able to resolve the challenge you present.

CHOICE Savings & Investments is today the only solution capable of resolving this requirement, and does so through its patented, unique platform - delivering much needed innovative and disruptive bespoke savings and investment products (www.choicefs.com).

Westpac's experience is a great example of what not to do.

We should all also be aware that even good moves and good new ideas will almost always have some percentage of detractors among the crowd, who will find fault with some aspect of what you're offering or doing.

It's human nature.

Remember the famous saying:

“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”.

As you said, social media is a means to create dialogue and understand each other - respond to feedback, try and convince and get buy-in... not to ignore, delete or hide from content that you don't like.

Thanks for feedback and additional comments.

To add to my earlier comment about banks having a vested interest... my own bank in Spain has offered this service for a number of years for card transactions.

Rather than swamping me with an excessive number of SMS messages, their system alerts me to transactions that are outside of my "normal" behaviour. For example transactions executed overseas... transactions outside of the normal amount threshhold, etc.

This works great for me, and is cost efficient for the bank also.

I agree that the same concepts could / should be applied to other products such as checking accounts, time deposits, or similar... with alerts for "new" transactions, amounts over a certain threshhold that are not regular transactions, balance warnings when the balance falls below a certain pre-defined amount, or maturity advices etc.

I think that you may find on further investigation that the banks are not offering this service simply out of the goodness of their hearts... nor to make their customers feel safer.

Instead, many of the banks I know who offer this "free" service are doing so to try and reduce the write-offs they suffer from card fraud.

Could not agree more... refreshing to see that some sanity still remains...

I know.. it's not funny... but the idea that someone can have "grave" concerns about a department that handles the accounts of "deceased" customers does make me smile.

When all the restructuring is finished, will someone be doing a "post-mortem" analysis to see if the forecast benefits have really been achieved.

Maybe other banks will analyse their own processing in order to see if they should be "undertaking" similar initiatives.