Worshiping at the altar of silos
Agnostic platforms force digital everywhere to support customers at every point of contact. An agnostic platform is essential to becoming a disruptive bank anywhere.
In this newsletter, I wrap up my analysis of digital banking solution strategies based on Rick Wilson’s book Running Against the Devil.
The 4 things I’ve outlined that you can learn from Rick Wilson:
2. Focus on Who Votes (Youth don’t vote)
3. Think Digital Everything, Not Digital First
4. Stop Flying by Seat of Your Pants
Today’s issue is going to cover #3 & # 4
Think Digital Everything, Not Digital First
The parallels between the evolution of digital in banking and political campaigns is uncanny. As Wilson observes:
“Campaigns have evolved in the last decade from digital being just one element of the campaign to digital is the campaign. Until 2004...campaigns were built using the same model they’d followed for generations: money, media, and message delivered by the modality of the time, first human contact, then print, then radio, then television, then cable, and lastly digital” (Wilson, p.130)
Like political campaigns, digital banking vendors & banks have seen the same change over the last decade. Banks & vendors have certainly made inroads into their traditional thinking about “branch first” in terms of customer contact.
Stop worshiping at the altar of silos
But how many banks — and vendors to be honest - have yet to take the next step: Move from “digital as a channel or add-on” to this philosophy:
digital campaigning is platform-agnostic (Wilson, p 130).
Is your digital banking solution is the platform not only for mobile or online services or voice banking but also every other contact with your customers. Yes, including the branch. Yes, including the ATM.
How easily can the bank respond to customers as they move from device to channel to device? This is an old problem. Given the challenges posed by COVID 19, how quickly can banks pivot their services to be digital anywhere? Like this:
The test for your solution is platform-agnosticism. If you develop voice banking capabilities that operate outside of your digital platform, then you are not platform-agnostic. If the solution can’t be used anywhere by customers, then it’s not agnostic. If your solution does not deliver digital banking services to the branch, then it’s not agnostic.
The biggest problem is the digital banking solution that still assumes that customers — whether consumer, SMB, corporate treasurer, high net worth - all follow traditional paths to use banking services. In 2020, that assumption is not digital first.
Flying by the seat of your pants
If you’ve read the previous issues of the newsletter & you’re starting to think about hidden tribes, capabilities your platform requires to address older customers, and platform-agnostic banking, the last piece of the puzzle is this:
“You don’t have to fly blind” (Wilson, p 184)
It’s time to stop flying by the seat of your pants
“The ability of campaigns to turn polling and underlying social-media analytics into actionable political intelligence has been proven. You have the ability to target and segment messaging to a degree of granularity and power that was unobtainable two decades ago….Voters are telling you things every day...But listening and taking action based on those streams of data and information (and there is a distinction) takes a willingness to subsume political desires for political practicality” Wilson p 184-185
It’s not enough to have the right strategy, team, culture, digital architecture and even the right digital banking platform. A platform-agnostic digital banking solution that doesn’t enable your bank customers to listen to and act on data from social media, from its mobile apps, from the branch - well, from anywhere. The bank must be able to use that data as the basis of actions and services the bank will take or create for customers. Any customer - consumers or high net worth or small business or non-profit or big business. Anywhere, any time. Even face-to-face. In a mask of course.
Digital banking capabilities that will be necessary include the ability to create actions based on data and information that enables the bank to identify & target customers at a new granularity. You must ask:
Does your platform enable banks to know more about their customers and prospects and act on that data?
Can the platform leverage APIs to connect to non-traditional data sources to tap into data and knowledge about existing & prospective customers? Take, for example, your assumptions about small businesses:
Can a bank test its assumptions about SMBs in their markets with third party data from, say, a government database?
What do you know about how SMB owners use fintechs & other startups to pay employees, move money to manage their business, or track invoices?
What do you know about business owners who start their first business after the age of 50?
Can the bank use data from its digital banking solution to identify unmet needs by analyzing how customers use existing bank products? For example, are there consumers who received a growing number of payments via PayPal or Xoom or Zelle or Transferwise?
Moving away from traditional methods and means of identifying customers, markets, products is dangerous. It’s uncomfortable and hard. But the reward is remaining relevant. The reward is growing a variety of different & new digital banking capabilities that your bank customers can leverage to grow their business. And, no, I couldn’t resist a photo of a bountiful harvest.
Image by Ulrike Leone from Pixabay
Who publishes this newsletter?
I’m a former Gartner analyst. I’ve worked in and covered the banking industry for 27 years. I still think & write about digital banking — but also indulge my other interests, women in tech, startups - especially those in the US Midwest & South Eastern Europe), leadership & change, and AgTech.
I write this newsletter for people who are trying to differentiate their banking software in an increasingly competitive market. That could be people who work at software companies currently developing banking software or people at vendors that want to move vertically into the banking market. I think this focus will interest bankers and investors as well.
I publish this newsletter publishes weekly – so some ideas and thoughts may not be fully fleshed out. I may reject earlier ideas in future newsletters. I may expand one idea into a longer piece here or elsewhere. For now, this newsletter is free.
You can find & talk to me on twitter and LinkedIn — I look forward to our conversation!
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