I actually believe the problem with Banking is symptomatic of more existential problems that the whole industry (as well as others…) is facing, as their ultimate challenge is identify what they will monetise in the future.
1. Lack of Customer Centricity
Banking products are part of a bigger outcome/need for customers triggered by life events. There is a gap between what banks provide and what customers actually need.
This is a great study from Accenture on the new expectations of banking customers and what they mean for Banks.
The basic idea is rather than providing banking products, banks need to weave an experience that enables a customer outcome, by knitting together their products, their data in enabling complimentary services and topping and tailing where their employees/channels play a role.
The time for we can do everything ourselves is long gone, it’s just the letter never arrived through the mail…
2. Culture change, not Tech
This not possible to change by simply changing processes, systems and infrastructure – it requires the whole organisation to think differently and the culture to become one of enablement, learning and incentivising of employees to focus on those and some new (and younger) customer outcomes.
To even get started organisations need to understand what makes their people tick and then what is the vision of what they’re trying to achieve.
This summary of how Google is trying to do this is awesome: Project Aristotle.
3. Existential Agility needed
This requires Banks to think bigger than the historical boundaries of their industry and realise they can’t execute across the end to end supply chain and customer lifecycle – sometimes they will need to partner between themselves or even enable Ecosystems.
Only with these three new paradigms banks stand a chance to capitalise on digital, Virtual, Quantum, and all the transformations after these. They will come faster, harder and more global.
Digital is only the first one, as a sneak peek into the future let’s all pause and think about Facebook’s Libra. Rather than invent products they are trying to redesign the fabric of currency, and I’m sure this will lead to brand new discussions with regulators and probably a whole new set of expectations from users.
We tend to forget many of these things have already happened in places like Kenya and China – Digital makes these trends borderless, and no industry is safe from convenience, trust or value.
PS: Here’s a London keynote on the topic at Zuora‘s Subscribed London event in 2018 – download here.
PSS: The original article that led me to write this can be found here.